Lehangoló tudomány, vagy a politika művészete?
Dismal Science or the Art of Politics? Leadership, Manipulation and Democracy

Summary/Abstract: The article is about William Riker’s heresthetics, i.e. the manipulation of decision-making situations. Providing cases from Hungarian politics, it seeks to analyse the ways of heresthetic political leaders using to solve political disequilibrium situations in order to get into a winning position. According to Riker and his followers, there is no way out of cyclical majorities and disequilibrium without leadership and manipulation and there is no coherent social choice without it. The article argues that the implications of Riker’s heresthetics are even more far-reaching. Namely, heresthetics is suitable (indirectly) to manipulate even voter preferences. Agenda-setting, manipulation of decision-making alternatives and the introduction of new dimensions of judgement are the major means of this manipulation. A new political perspective can change the actual political meaning of preferences and through this it may create a new preference-ordering. Therefore, heresthetics undermines a crucial presumption of social choice theory, i.e. the assumption of exogenous voter preferences.

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