Hungary has gerrymandering and other voter suppression stuff, but primarily it has divided opposition. The party in power has 1⁄3, but the other 2⁄3 is split 4 ways, plus minor parties. One particularly good election where they got ~1/2 the vote due to temporary members let them claim a supermajority of legislative seats, and then use that supermajority to change the rules so that any party with a core 30% level would retain majority power indefinitely (plus putting in party appartchiks in lots of governmental and judicial roles). If the opposition was fully unified, they could take back control, theoretically, but the media/bureaucratic control lets them work against that happening.
Democracies have laws, norms, and systems that prevent the elected government from directly rewarding their voters. They have to spread the rewards more generally (eg even if my company didn’t support you, I still get to bid on government contracts. Often there is a bureaucracy and military that are held independent of political parties, and demand a large share of the “rewards” leaving not enough $ left to bribe 51% of the electorate.
Some people value equality/fairness as a terminal value. If you have (and/or create via childhood messeging) a large enough fraction of your population with that value, one of the “rewards” you can hand out is even-handed policies that spread the $ rewards out (in the form of public goods / programs), which that group will vote for over their own selfish enrichment.
Hungary has gerrymandering and other voter suppression stuff, but primarily it has divided opposition. The party in power has 1⁄3, but the other 2⁄3 is split 4 ways, plus minor parties. One particularly good election where they got ~1/2 the vote due to temporary members let them claim a supermajority of legislative seats, and then use that supermajority to change the rules so that any party with a core 30% level would retain majority power indefinitely (plus putting in party appartchiks in lots of governmental and judicial roles). If the opposition was fully unified, they could take back control, theoretically, but the media/bureaucratic control lets them work against that happening.
Democracies have laws, norms, and systems that prevent the elected government from directly rewarding their voters. They have to spread the rewards more generally (eg even if my company didn’t support you, I still get to bid on government contracts. Often there is a bureaucracy and military that are held independent of political parties, and demand a large share of the “rewards” leaving not enough $ left to bribe 51% of the electorate.
Some people value equality/fairness as a terminal value. If you have (and/or create via childhood messeging) a large enough fraction of your population with that value, one of the “rewards” you can hand out is even-handed policies that spread the $ rewards out (in the form of public goods / programs), which that group will vote for over their own selfish enrichment.