East-Central European countries have been hit by the economic crisis especially hard. This article argues that reactions to the crisis by the Hungarian government of Viktor Orbán have been distinct in several ways. The crisis has been used by the cabinet as a rationale to carry out paradigmatic reforms in nearly all policy fields within a very short period of time while the two-thirds parliamentary majority provided an opportunity for this. There have been no widespread protests and no veto players have prevented the implementation of reforms, partly because checks and balances, including the Constitutional Court, have been put aside. The direction of reforms has been diffuse and often contradictory, consisting of neo-liberal, étatist and neo-conservative elements. Early assessment of changes indicates the increasing polarization of society not only in terms of income but also of ethnicity.

This article documents and compares the social policies that the governments in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) implemented to combat the first wave of COVID‐19 pandemic by focusing on Hungary, Lithuania, Poland and Slovakia. Our findings show that governments in all four countries reacted to the COVID‐19 crisis by providing extensive protection for jobs and enterprises. Differences arise when it comes to solidaristic policy responses to care for the most vulnerable population, in which CEE countries show great variation. We find that social policy responses to the first wave of COVID‐19 have largely depended on precious social policy trajectories as well as the political situation of the country during the pandemic.

The rise of populist governance throughout the world offers a novel opportunity to study the way in which populist leaders and parties rule. This article conceptualises populist policy making by theoretically addressing the substantive and discursive components of populist policies and the decision-making processes of populist governments. It first reconstructs the implicit ideal type of policy making in liberal democracies based on the mainstream governance and policy making scholarship. Then, taking stock of the recent populism literature, the article elaborates an ideal type of populist policy making along the dimensions of content, procedures and discourses. As an empirical illustration we apply a qualitative congruence analysis to assess the conformity of a genuine case of populist governance, social policy in post-2010 Hungary with the populist policy making ideal type. Concerning the policy content, the article argues that policy heterodoxy, strong willingness to adopt paradigmatic reforms and an excessive responsiveness to majoritarian preferences are distinguishing features of any type of populist policies. Regarding the procedural features populist leaders tend to downplay the role of technocratic expertise, sideline veto-players and implement fast and unpredictable policy changes. Discursively, populist leaders tend to extensively use crisis frames and discursive governance instruments in a Manichean language and a saliently emotional manner that reinforces polarisation in policy positions. Finally, the article suggests that policy making patterns in Hungarian social policy between 2010 and 2018 have been largely congruent with the ideal type of populist policy making.