Tis The Season For Alarmism: Exaggerating Hungary’s Descent
Daniel Berman rebutts Paul Krugman on Hungary.
8 Jan 2012, 13:00
Krugman: Alarmist?
It is a season for alarmism, especially on the Left. Amidst cuts as far as the eye can see, recession, and the prospect of a Republican resurgence in the United States, its easy to see why individuals like Paul Krugman are in something of an irritable mood.
What is more surprising is how the supposed threat to Democracy in Hungary has somehow become a cause célèbre in the West since the decisive victory of the Center-Right Fidesz party in the 2010 elections. To read Hungary’s critics in the New York Times, the country is in the grip of an anti-Semitic, neo-fascist movement, which has gutted the independent press, and has gerrymandered parliamentary boundaries to ensure its more or less permanent dominance.
The point of this piece is not to defend Fidesz’s behavior in government as a whole, of which much is concerning, especially regarding its economic policies. This piece is however intended to point out that some of the more opportunist critics have joined the chorus against Fidesz have done so with an appalling lack of research, not to mention any degree of even internal consistency.
At the top of the list in this respect is Paul Krugman, the New York Times’ economist nee left-wing polemicist, who has been taking the lead on this charge over the last month ever since publishing a December 11th editorial entitled “Depression and Democracy” in which he outlines a crackdown on the independent judiciary, press, and electoral organs and concludes that “Taken together, all this amounts to the re-establishment of authoritarian rule, under a paper-thin veneer of democracy, in the heart of Europe.” Since its publication, Krugman has repeatedly updated his blog with follow-up posts that have grown ever more inflammatory in their charges against the Hungarian government.
Krugman’s major source for these is Kim Lane Scheppele, a Princeton Professor, and Krugman has increasingly published Scheppele’s material wholesale on his blog, apparently with very little if any fact checking. A line-by-line response from the Hungarian Ambassador was not published for more than a week after it was sent to the Times, while Scheppele was allowed to publish gems like the following:
The Constitutional Court, which once had the responsibility to review nearly all laws for constitutionality, has been killed off in three ways. First, the government expanded the number of judges on the bench and filled the new positions with their own political allies (think: Roosevelt’s court-packing plan). Then, the government restricted the jurisdiction of the court so that it can no longer review any law that has an impact on the budget, like laws pertaining to taxes and austerity programs, unless the law infringes particular listed rights. Finally, the government changed the rules of access to the court so that it will no longer be easily able to review laws in the abstract for their compliance with the constitution. Moreover, individuals can no longer challenge the constitutionality of laws without first going through a lengthy process in the ordinary courts. The old Constitutional Court, which has served as the major check on governmental power in a unicameral parliamentary system, is now functionally dead.
All of these changes except for the first are already present in many Western Democracies, and as for the former, its impacts have evidently been a lot less than Scheppele implied. Only a week after declaring the Constitutional Court all but dead on December 19th, Paul Krugman noted in a follow piece that “Last week, the Constitutional Court, which was pronounced dead when its ranks were expanded and packed with government supporters earlier in the year, lumbered back to life with three new decisions that appeared to deal strong blows to the Fidesz government. The Court struck down part of the media law, invalidated the controversial law on the status of churches and said that it was unconstitutional for the public prosecutor to have the power to pick which judges would hear the criminal cases he brought.”
“Was pronounced dead” is an interesting turn of phrase for Krugman to use, when it was his primary informant on Hungary affairs writing on his own blog exactly two weeks earlier who declared it to be “functionally dead”. Krugman attempts to minimize the damage that the victory of events over his assertion caused by noting that several of the rulings were overturned when the Parliament amended the Constitution, but that is an attack on Fidesz’s handling of the majority, not on the Constitution, and ignores the fact the newly purged and gutted Constitutional Court seems to be functioning just fine.
Equally problematic is another charge that Scheppele and Krugman made on the 19th of December, namely that:
The new election law specifies the precise boundaries of the new electoral districts that will send representatives to the parliament. But the new districts are drawn in such a way that no other party on the political horizon besides Fidesz is likely to win election.
In support of this shocking claim they cite only one piece of evidence, a report from three Hungarian academics, noting that they “ran the numbers from the last three elections using the new district boundaries. Fidesz would have won all three elections, including the two they actually lost.” While this may sound damming, it’s unclear if either Krugman or Scheppele actually read the very report that the former cites in his blog and if he did, whether he attempted to perform any additional research.
Had Krugman bothered to perform a search for past Hungarian electoral results, he would have found that both Scheppele’s arguments, and the study they are based on, reach the heights of intellectual dishonesty. It is true that Fidesz would have won both the 2002 and 2006 elections under the new lines, and that they lost them under the current system. But what is not noted anywhere is first, that Fidesz actually did win more seats under the existing map in 2002, and that Fidesz actually won more votes in 2006 than the opposition Socialists, but nevertheless won less seats. This was due to a massive anti-Fidesz bias in the first-past-the-post seats, who like the Conservative Party in the UK, tend to face structural problems that tend to be exacerbated over time by population shifts between each redistribution. As a consequence, any redistribution in Hungary would result in Fidesz gaining seats, just as any redistribution in the UK almost invariably results in Conservative gains.
Ironically, the new lines actually make the system much fairer. Under the old lines in 2006, Fidesz won 68 single-seat constituencies with 2,269,241 votes, or 42%, while the Socialists and their allies won 98 with or 2,175,312, or 40% of the vote. By contrast, the study linked to on Krugman’s blog notes that “modeling the cumulative outcome of the 2006 elections we see that MSZP and SZDSZ jointly receive 96 mandates (48.2%), Fidesz-KDNP 97 mandates (48.7%), and MDF would have gotten 6 mandates (3%).” The analysis managed to maintain its claims of bias by comparing these results not to vote totals, which appear nowhere in its published report, but to the results in the status quo declaring that these results “contradicts the fact that the left-liberal bloc had an obvious parliamentary majority (54.4% of mandates), and that MSZP’s own faction within parliament was larger itself (49.2%).”This is an interesting conclusion to maintain when the authors of the report themselves concede that:
Taking into consideration the population changes of the past 20 years, one must concede that the correction of voting districts (regardless of the specific number of individual mandates) would only be fair if in certain parts of the country (especially in Budapest and Pest county) the number of single-seat constituencies would be reformed to the detriment of Hungary’s leftwing parties. The reason for this, to put it simply, is that the population decreased in multi-mandate regions where the leftwing has traditionally been strong. Therefore, over the past two decades the distribution of single-seat constituencies has become somewhat disadvantageous for the Hungarian rightwing.
The fact ignored by Scheppele, and which Krugman either ignores or is too lazy to be anything but unaware of is that new electoral system brought in by Fidesz is actually vastly more proportional than the old one and that any changes would favor Fidesz. The reality is that there is a very easy way for the opposition to win more seats than Fidesz, and that is to win more votes, something they failed to achieve in two of their three electoral victories.
Professor Scheppelle seems unfamiliar with any recent Hungarian history. According to a response to the Hungarian Ambassador posted on Krugman’s blog “True, the 2002 election was close. But the 2006 election was not, and even then the new districts would have thrown the election to Fidesz.” It’s hard to tell what she is talking about here. Fidesz did better in votes in 2006 than in 2002, 42% to 39.4%, and while the gap in seats expanded, a 188-178 Fidesz lead becoming a 186-164 Socialist one, this had to do with two more minor parties making the threshold for PR seats rather than with the electoral districts, the subject of her criticism.
This piece is not intended to defend the Fidesz government, its behavior, or the new Constitution as a whole. But legitimate criticism of the Hungarian Government, its economic policies, and its behavior towards minorities are being buried by opportunistic pile-ons of the sort that Paul Krugman has engaged in over the last month. He owes it to his readers, and to Hungarians, both supporters and opponents of Fidesz. There are more than enough legitimate points on which to hit the government in Budapest that rants like Krugman simply delegitimize the actual opposition.
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