Opposition rallies in Hungary flipped 11% of the ruling party's supporters even in a country where the government controls almost all the media.
April 26, 2026
Original Paper
Challenging the Ruler by Visiting the Voter: Evidence from Hungary
SSRN · 6641438
The Takeaway
Political scientists often assume that state controlled media makes it impossible for an opposition party to reach voters in an autocracy. Personal campaign rallies in small towns provide a direct physical bypass to these media blockades. The presence of a candidate in person creates a surge in support that television and internet propaganda cannot easily counteract. This 3.5 percentage point boost is enough to swing local elections and challenge the regime's grip on power. Even in a digital world of total media dominance, the oldest form of campaigning remains the most effective way to break a political monopoly.
From the abstract
Do opposition rallies shift votes in electoral autocracies? We exploit a unique "greenfield" opposition campaign-the 2024 Country Tour of Péter Magyar, leader of TISZA, Hungary's newly revived opposition party-to estimate the causal effect of campaign rallies on European Parliament election outcomes. Using settlement-level data, we combine a distance-based exposure design with fixed effects and coarsened exact matching to address non-random rally placement and spatial spillovers. Results show th