Government policies in Hungary and Poland draw increasing concerns about democratic backsliding within the European Union. However, until now, other European Union (EU) member states have not reacted strongly; consequences for either country have been minimal so far. Is the European Union stuck in an unfortunate authoritarian equilibrium, as Daniel Kelemen has argued? Or, alternatively, might the lack of repercussions for Hungary and Poland be due to inertia in transnational perceptions of politics in these countries?

Political actors and publics in other member states may be slow to change their general beliefs about these countries and their governments, in part because media coverage of those countries has changed little. This paper tests this alternative explanation by analyzing the depiction of Poland and Hungary in leading newspapers in the five largest EU member states: Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Spain. Across these member states, I compile a unique corpus of tens of thousands of articles mentioning the two countries, and leverage new developments in machine translation and machine learning to analyze and compare them directly.

This makes it possible to test, for the first time, several hypotheses about the lack of member state reactions to democratic backsliding, as these five countries vary on geographical distance, historical ties, political affinity, and commercial connections, among others. The findings have implications not just for our understanding of how member states handle intra-EU challenges, but also, more broadly, of how one state’s image of another state may shift over time.