Challenging the ruler by visiting the voter: evidence from Hungary

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 nonrandom rally placement and spatial spillovers. Results show that Tisza’s vote share was 3.1–3.5 percentage points larger in visited settlements relative to unexposed ones, accounting for about 10% of their national result. Rallies simultaneously reduced the governing party’s (Fidesz) support. Our findings suggest that out of 100 Fidesz supporters, 11 changed their vote in response to rallies. Google Trends evidence and heterogeneous effects suggest an awareness-raising mechanism specific to autocracies. These findings demonstrate that personal campaigning can yield substantial electoral gains for an opposition operating under severe media bias and organizational constraints.