The Accumulative State

Scheiring, Gábor

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-48752-2_7

Cited by 10 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…Yet it is not the case that the people of Halas have become rabid nationalists in recent years. They vote for Orbán because no other party has made a comparable effort to speak to their concerns, following a generation of postsocialist insecurity in which they have been systematically marginalized at the expense of a new national bourgeoisie (Scheiring, 2020a).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This may not be entirely accurate. But what most family-owned businesses perceive as a ‘ceiling’ above which they cannot expect to win lucrative contracts, is for the dominant party a floor on which to consolidate the national bourgeoisie (Scheiring, 2020a). As Gábor Scheiring shows, this proceeds in tandem with transnational investments.…”

Section: Civil Society In Kiskunhalasmentioning

confidence: 99%

“… 16. The concept of ‘postpeasant populism’ was introduced by Juraj Buzalka (2008) with reference to the confluence of religious and national sentiments in conservative provincial Poland, before the full impact of EU accession. My analysis here owes more to the work of Gábor Scheiring (2020a) on the links between political domination and economic power in post-2010 Hungary; where Scheiring documents the authoritarianism of the FIDESZ-led regime, I emphasize continuities in the values to which this party appeals as it consolidates support in a postpeasant population no longer benefiting from socialist embourgeoisement (see also Hann, 2018). …”

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confidence: 99%

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In search of civil society: From peasant populism to postpeasant illiberalism in provincial Hungary

Hann

2020

Social Science Information

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The need to rebuild civil society was a prominent theme in dissident writings in East-Central Europe in late socialism, but the revival of this concept deserves close scrutiny and local contextualization. This article identifies two currents in Hungarian debates, one focused on addressing problems of backwardness by opening up paths of material embourgeoisement and the other on abstract liberal notions of associational freedom. It then outlines successive transformations of economic and social life in a small Hungarian town where no industry existed prior to socialism and the dominant political forces were populist in the sense of ‘peasantism’. The agrarian and industrial transformations of the socialist decades were undone in the 1990s. In the 2010s, under governments led by Viktor Orbán, it is argued that norms of civility have been threatened by postpeasant illiberalism. If civil society was the gauntlet laid down to social theorists by East-Central Europe in 1989, the challenge posed by this region nowadays is the theorization of incivility and a new brand of populism. It is suggested that these political processes are driven by the collapse of socialist embourgeoisement and the emergence of a new national bourgeoisie under peripheral capitalism, and that some of the moral responsibility for these developments lies with the unwavering intellectual enthusiasts of abstract liberalism.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Civil Society In Kiskunhalasmentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

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In search of civil society: From peasant populism to postpeasant illiberalism in provincial Hungary

Hann

2020

Social Science Information

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“…The puzzle under the third wave of autocratizers arises from the fact that we have witnessed social policy expansion in certain cases parallel to the weakening of democratic institutions. While recent research has helped us make sense of policy developments in some countries (Lendvai-Bainton and Szelewa, 2021; Logvinenko, 2020; Scheiring, 2020), these country- and policy area-specific narratives have not yet coalesced into a systematic, comparative analysis of the welfare state during democratic backsliding. We aim to fill this gap.…”

Section: Democracy and The Welfare Statementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The increased divisions between labour market insiders and outsiders contributed to exclusionary processes in social policy. Reforms disproportionately benefited the better-off, pursuing upward redistribution (Scheiring, 2020). The Hungarian welfare state under Fidesz overall strengthened stratification and shifted the former ‘mixed’ welfare system in the direction of conservative, Bismarckian welfare regime type with neoliberal, workfarist undertones.…”

Section: Welfare State Trajectories Under Democratic Backslidingmentioning

confidence: 99%

An illiberal welfare state emerging? Welfare efforts and trajectories under democratic backsliding in Hungary and Turkey

Szikra

Öktem

2022

Journal of European Social Policy

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Mainstream western-centric welfare state research has mostly confined itself to studying social policy in consolidated democracies and tends to assume a synergy between democracy and the welfare state. This article shifts the focus to welfare states in countries with declining democratic institutions and rising right-wing populist rule to explore a complex relationship between (de)democratization and welfare state reforms. We conduct a comparative case study of two extreme cases of democratic decline, Turkey and Hungary. We employ a sequential mixed method approach. First, we assess welfare efforts in the two countries to understand which policy areas were prioritized and whether autocratizing governments retrenched or expanded their welfare states. In the second stage, we explore the trajectory of welfare reforms in Hungary and Turkey, focusing on three analytically distinguishable dimensions of social policy change: policy content, policy procedures (including timing, parliamentary procedures, veto players); and the discourses accompanying reforms. We find that democratic decline facilitates rapid welfare state change but it does not necessarily mean retrenchment. Instead we observe ambivalent processes of welfare state restructuring. Common themes emerging in both countries are the rise of flagship programmes that ensure electoral support, a transition towards top-down decision-making and the salient role of discourse in welfare governance. Overall, similarities are stronger in procedures and discourse than in the direction of reforms. Differences in spending levels and policy content do not suggest that the two cases constitute a coherent illiberal welfare state regime. Instead, we see the emergence of authoritarian features that modify their original welfare models.

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Taxation and the Polanyian forms of integration in socialist and postsocialist Hungary

Hann¹

2023

Economic Anthropology

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Reciprocity, redistribution, and (market) exchange were the “forms of integration” put forward by Karl Polanyi as a “special tool box” to investigate relations between economy and society where the principle of price‐forming markets is not (yet) dominant. Though intended as the basis for a comparative alternative to the universalist assumptions of mainstream (neoclassical) economics, Polanyi did not make significant use of these concepts to analyze the noncapitalist societies of his day. This article investigates his Hungarian homeland, which in four decades of socialism evolved from Stalinist central planning to a mixed economy in which (re)distribution was supplemented by the expansion of market exchange, with personal taxation playing a negligible role. The constellation of (re)distribution and market has changed significantly in the postsocialist (neoliberal) era, but Scandinavian‐type societal reciprocity has remained elusive. Long after admission to the European Union, Hungarian fiscal and social policy regimes are distinctive as the market form of integration combines with low taxation and political interventions to (re)distribute resources (including transfer income from the EU) to support the formation of a national bourgeoisie. Theoretically, the perspective of the socialist Karl Polanyi is contrasted with that of the liberal institutionalist economist János Kornai.

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The Accumulative State

Cited by 10 publications

References 19 publications

In search of civil society: From peasant populism to postpeasant illiberalism in provincial Hungary

In search of civil society: From peasant populism to postpeasant illiberalism in provincial Hungary

An illiberal welfare state emerging? Welfare efforts and trajectories under democratic backsliding in Hungary and Turkey

Taxation and the Polanyian forms of integration in socialist and postsocialist Hungary

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