Six months, six years, six decades – this is how Ralf Dahrendorf (1990) summed up, in a remarkably succinct way, the post-democratic transition: creating the institutions of parliamentary democracy, laying the foundations of a market economy, building civil society.
The future looked clear and bright as a single three-dimensional transformation joining the ‘end of history’. I want to offer a different idea of the three transformations taking place over the last three decades: post-communist, (national) populist, post-democratic.
A key criterion for distinguishing between these transformations is what Philippe C. Schmitter in 1994 called “symbolic-ideological hegemony” or what Charles Tilly (1975) defined as the elite project that dominates the political scene: that is a project that dominates discourses, strategies and policies, on the one hand, and values and attitudes on the other.
