The Two Geopolitical Models of Autocratization in the Western World

While political regime theory recognizes the importance of the international environment in democratization and autocratization processes, the interplay between foreign policy and the democratic or authoritarian change of regime types remains rather understudied. This multidisciplinary paper rooted in the conjunction of democratization and regime theory as well as international relations and Europeanization literature conceptualizes the link between gradual regime change and foreign policy with a special focus on autocratization in democratic external environment. It is built around the hypothesis that autocratizing regimes that exist in a democratic international environment consciously use foreign policy to minimize the impact of the democratic environment on domestic processes, specifically the "adaptation pressure" stemming from the existing "misfit" between the domestic political system and its international environment (Börzel-Risse 2002). Identifying geopolitical loyalty as the key dependent variable, it argues that two models of autocratizing foreign policy are identifiable: one that trades geopolitical loyalty for non-interference and another that uses geopolitical disloyalty to raise the strategic costs of confrontation for democratic partners. The paper applies the methodology of theory-testing process tracing (Beach & Pedersen 2013) to identify and track the causal mechanism present in the foreign policy decisions of the Hungarian and Polish governments after the start of domestic autocratization (2010 and 2015 respectively) that determine why autocratizing governments opts for one or other model and how do they use foreign policy decisions in practice to lower the adaptation pressure.