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

Populism scholars cannot ignore the robust causal evidence on the disruptive political effects of economic insecurity and claim that economic factors play no role in populism. To beat right-wing populism, politicians and policymakers need to tackle economic insecurity. My piece in the Culture Wars Papers of the Illiberalism Studies Program.

Dependency theory is back! It's so great to see this book and my chapter on dependency just published. In 2019, dependency theory celebrated its 50th birthday: Cardoso & Faletto's classic, Dependency and Development, had been published in 1969 originally, and in 1979 in English - the same year as Peter Evans' book, Dependent development, had come out, who wrote a blazing endorsement of this new book. On this occasion, Aldo Madariaga and Stefano Palestini organized an internat

G. Scheiring and M. Veres: in Europa Publications (ed.) Central and South-Eastern Europe Abstract The results of Hungary’s transformation from a state-run economy into a market-based model are mixed at best. On the positive side, except in times of global recession, the country’s economy was able to expand continuously over the past 30 years, while domestic businesses integrated successfully into the global economy. Hungary was able to establish strong commercial ties with th

Theis article - co-authored by Kristóf Szombati - presents and empirically substantiates a theoretical account explaining the making and stabilisation of illiberal hegemony in Hungary. It combines a Polanyian institutionalist framework with a neo-Gramscian analysis of right-wing hegemonic strategy and a relational class analysis inspired by the political economy tradition in anthropology. The article identifies the social actors behind the illiberal transformation, showing ho