Post-democratic discursive hegemony – a natural language processing-based analysis of Hungarian parliamentary discourses between 1998-2020

The parliament, as a key component of the public sphere, is both a reflection of and a stage for the post-democratic transition. Our study examines Hungarian parliamentary discourse as an indicator of a transition in which democratic institutions persist yet become hollow and are repurposed for charismatic legitimacy. Using natural language processing, we analyse a corpus of all parliamentary speeches from 1998 to 2020, employing keyness analysis and Jaccard similarity to track discursive shifts over time. By interpreting these shifts through a field-theoretical lens, we explore how political parties construct legitimacy – whether through legal-bureaucratic or charismatic means – and how ideological differentiation occurs within an increasingly fragmented media landscape. Our findings reveal patterns of discursive stability and transformation, shedding light on Hungary's role as a pioneering "political laboratory" of post-democracy. This study contributes to the understanding of the structural changes that are reshaping contemporary Western democracies.