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

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

This article for the Marxist Sociology Blog presents a novel theory on deindustrialization, social disintegration, and health.

How do populists govern health? How are they handling covid19? We answer these questions by analyzing Viktor Orban's Hungary.

The article conceptualises Hungary's neo-nationalist turn as a Polanyian countermovement against globalisation and deindustrialisation.

Abstract: An unprecedented mortality crisis befell the former socialist countries between 1989 and 1995, representing one of the most significant demographic shocks of the post-Second World War period. Academic research has identified economic transitions as a crucial factor behind the post-socialist mortality crisis. However, most previous studies relied on either country-level or individual-level data, which leaves the potential for modeling error, as they cannot assess bot

Abstract An unprecedented mortality crisis befell the former socialist countries between 1989 and 1995, representing one of the greatest demographic shocks of the period after the Second World War. While it is likely that country-level variation in the post-socialist mortality crisis in Eastern Europe can be explained by a constellation of political and socio-economic factors, no comprehensive review of the existing scholarly attempts at explaining these factors exists. We re

Background Research on the health outcomes of globalisation and economic transition has yielded conflicting results, partly due to methodological and data limitations. Specifically, the outcomes of changes in foreign investment and state ownership need to be examined using multilevel data, linking macro-effects and micro-effects. We exploited the natural experiment offered by the Hungarian economic transition by means of a multilevel study designed to address these gaps in th

Background Population-level data suggest that economic disruptions in the early 1990s increased working-age male mortality in post-Soviet countries. This study uses individual-level data, using an indirect estimation method, to test the hypothesis that fast privatisation increased mortality in Russia. Azarova, A, D Irdam, A Gugushvili, M Fazekas, G Scheiring, P Horvat, D Stefler, I Kolesnikova, V Popov, D Stuckler, I Szelenyi, M Marmot, M Murphy, M McKee, M Bobak and L King.

This chapter summarizes the theory and evidence regarding Mass Privatization programmes in the post-communist environment. It first defines Mass Privatization and compares it to other ways of privatization used during the postcommunist transition. It then summarizes the economic and political arguments for and against this method of privatization. Finally, it discusses the research on the economic and public health consequences of Mass Privatization. Darja Irdam, Gábor Scheir