Southeastern Europe 36 (2012) 349–372 © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2012 DOI 10.1163/18763332-03603004 brill.com/seeu he hreat of Selective Democracy. Popular Dissatisfaction and Exclusionary Strategy of Elites in East Central and Southeastern Europe Mihai Varga a and Annette Freyberg-Inan b a) Freie Universität Berlin b) University of Amsterdam Abstract he large dissatisfaction of citizens with post-communist democracy in Central and Eastern Europe favors populist and anti-systemic parties and movements. hese parties accuse their rivals of various forms of corruption and prescribe anti-systemic cures, including the discretionary exclusion of their rivals from political life. Analyzing the situations in Poland, Romania, and Hungary more closely, we reveal a risk of the development of “selective democracy,” in which key elites and their supporters redeine the borders of the polity in an exclusionary way, denying vari- ous groups of “enemies” legitimate access and representation and thereby undermining basic democratic principles. Keywords democratization, representation, elites, populism, Eastern Europe Introduction Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) looked safe even while the economic reforms of the irst half of the 1990s led to massive protests and the voting down of initial reformers in countries throughout the region. A decade after 1989, many regarded democratization in CEE as having been success- fully concluded. he pattern Western analysts typically observed was a self- congratulatory one of polarization by European integration, with complete democratization success in the post-communist countries that joined the European Union (EU), and intensifying failure to the East (Bunce 2003; Kitschelt 2003; McFaul 2005; Ekiert et al. 2007; Pop-Elecheş 2007). he main suggested explanation for this polarization was the efect of the EU’s