Why do some authoritarian capitalist regimes fail at development despite wielding robust state power? Existing explanations rooted in liberal institutionalism reduce this failure to rent-seeking, while developmental authoritarianism expects that centralised power enables long-horizon transformation. This article draws on the concept of the accumulative state to offer a new interpretation of why authoritarian capitalism fails to promote development. The accumulative state is a

Abstract: Why have liberal democracies yielded to illiberal populism? Comparing Hungary and the United States, we argue that the interaction between socioeconomic shocks and the strategic failures of center-left parties drives this transformation. We combine fine-grained Hungarian settlement-level data on industrial employment, mortality, and electoral outcomes from 1990 to 2010 with a content analysis of party manifestos, linking demand-side material dislocations to supply-s

This study for the FOUNDATION FOR EUROPEAN PROGRESSIVE STUDIES maps the international infrastructure scaling Orbán’s counter-hegemonic project. The roots of this counterhegemonic project go back to the exhaustion of liberal globalism, which created fertile ground for far-right challengers. Instead of progressive correction, the far right seized the initiative, treating the crisis of globalization as an opening for a long-term counter-hegemonic project. Viktor Orbán’s Hungary

Excited to see our new paper out in Comparative Political Studies. In this study, we extend the research on anti-immigrant attitudes by analyzing an overlooked factor: health. We develop a framework explaining why residents perceive competition for health services with immigrants. Using data from eleven rounds of the European Social Survey, covering 222,989 respondents in 30 European countries (2002–2023), we find a consistent association between poor health and anti-immigrat

Thrilled to see our new paper out now in European Journal of Sociology Abstract Social reproduction scholars have made headway in integrating the analysis of capitalism, class, gender, and care. We offer two contributions to this literature. First, we provide a novel framework with insights into companies as sites of decommodification, shaping childcare cost distribution and affecting childbearing rates. Second, we extend social reproduction research geographically to the oft

Comparative political economy took several years to catch up with the profound transformation of party politics that has occurred in advanced industrial nations over the past few decades. Until about a decade ago, traditional political economy models examining the relationship between (electoral) politics and socio-economic policies—particularly welfare and redistribution—operated under the assumption of a classic left-right divide. In this framework, workers would vote for t

The rise of authoritarian populism in East-Central Europe is often explained as a political reaction to economic neoliberalism. This chapter undertakes a more nuanced perspective, emphasizing economic growth models and underlying social coalitions. The Growth Model perspective is an alternative analytical lens to the Variety of Capitalisms perspective in comparative political economy. In the 1990s, a set of macro-economic reforms introduced via democratic political means, est

New study traces how ill health translates into anti-immigrant sentiment.

Happy to share my review of Ali Kadivar's excellent book on the social foundations of democracies, just out in the American Journal of Sociology. From Seymour Lipset to Stein Rokkan, sociologists were central in establishing the discipline of comparative politics, studying regime change. However, if you attend any conference today on democracy, you will hear much less about the social fabric of democracies than about its formal dimensions. Sociology has become peripheral in t

Thrilled to share our article just out in the British Journal of Political Science. The first meta-analysis of the evidence of a causal association between economic insecurity and populism provides a definite answer confirming that economic insecurity is a robust cause. Abstract The literature on populism is divided on whether economic factors are significant and robust causes of populism. To clarify this, we performed the first systematic review and meta-analysis of the evid