Zoltán Ádám

Corvinus University of Budapest · Institute of Economics

Soon after Viktor Orbán returned to power in 2010, Vladimir Putin’s Russia became a strategic ally for Hungary. This was a somewhat surprising development for a country with a history of mass movements for political freedom crushed with the assistance of Russian troops. Yet, unlike virtually all his European allies on the radical and populist Right...

A truly puzzling and indeed dramatic finding in the more recent waves of COVID-19 has been that pandemic-related death rates as well as excess death rates are very high in Central and Eastern Europe (hereinafter: CEE, referring to the 11 postcommunist member states of the EU) in comparison to the older member states. At the same time, the CEE regio...

The paper provides a case study on how the Orbán regime in Hungary has dealt with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) in 2020–2021. Despite having led worldwide rankings in pandemic‐related death rates since the second part of 2020, the government was not politically shaken by COVID‐19. Institutionally unrestrained, the governing majority periodica...

We focus on attitudinal changes in response to mass anti-immigration campaigns during and after the 2015 European refugee crisis in Hungary. As Hungarian attitudes towards migrants and refugees with non-European backgrounds took a particularly harsh negative turn in the wake of the crisis, we examine whether this has been associated with anti-immig...

Authoritarian or empowering? The populism—democracy nexus re-visited in context of the COVID-19 crisis in Central and Eastern Europe

Mapping European Populism -1: Central and Eastern Europe

Viktor Orbán's regime in Hungary is a prime example of authoritarian populism in a relatively developed country that has been part of the European Union since 2004. The paper argues that in response to the pandemic, the Orbán government pursued a set of selectively voluntarist policies that have been informed by an ultra‐orthodox, state‐centered wo...

The paper is concerned with the spectacular Hungarian democratic breakdown after 2010, focusing on political institutions and political economy dynamics the Orbán regime created. It argues that to understand what happened in Hungary after 2010, first we need to examine the unique system of political institutions of liberal democratic Hungary in 199...

Based on the theory of transaction cost economics, the paper argues that by vertically organizing political exchange, populist regimes reduce market-type political transaction costs—bargaining, enforcement and information costs—of democracy. However, management-type political transaction costs—organizational costs, partly stemming from corruption—r...

Research on populism has gained importance in the light of the recent global populist surge. Political scientists have become concerned with the problem of authoritarian populism, examining how illiberal, anti-pluralist populist parties have degraded liberal democracies. Economic research on recent forms of populism, although also growing, lack a c...

Research on populism has gained importance in the light of the recent global populist surge. Political scientists have become concerned with the problem of authoritarian populism, examining how illiberal, anti-pluralist populist parties have degraded liberal democracies. Economic research on recent forms of populism, although also growing, lack a c...

This paper conceptualizes authoritarian populism in an institutional economics context. Examining the literature on populism in political science, it considers authoritarian populism a degraded form of democracy that holds elections in regular intervals as means of popular legitimation, but undermines pluralism and constrains political choice. Base...

Papers presented at The Second International Economic Forum on Reform, Transition and Growth (Corvinus University of Budapest, Nov 3-5, 2016), focusing on the Eurozone (Bruno Dallago), post-communist economic transition and privatization (Dragana Mitrovic & Marko Tmusic), East Asia (Csaba Moldicz), Russia (Irina A. Vasilenko), innovation policies (...

This paper conceptualizes populism in an institutional economics context. Examining the literature on populism in political science, it subscribes to the view that populism is a degraded form of democracy that holds elections in regular intervals as rituals of popular legitimation, but undermines pluralism and diminishes effective political choice....

Our paper explores how populist radical right-wing forces re-interpret religion, and re-frame Christianity in a non-universalistic, nationalist way to legitimize their rule in Hungary. Populism is considered as an anti-elitist, anti-institutional political behavior that identifies with ‘the people’, and enhances their ‘direct’ participation in the...

A tanulmány arra próbál magyarázatot keresni, hogy mi az oka az utóbbi évek látványos - a külső szemlélő számára egyre növekvő horderejűnek tűnő - német vállalati botrányáinak. A botrányok alapvetően kétfajta, a nagy német feldolgozóipari vállalatok számára egyaránt meghatározó fontosságú kapcsolatrendszer anomáliáiból fakadnak. Az első esetben a m...

A tanulmány a huszadik század második felének latin-amerikai és kelet-ázsiai gazdaságfejlődését elemezve felhívja a figyelmet az állami szerepvállalás jelentőségére a gazdasági fejlődés előmozdításában.A fejlesztő államon alapuló kelet-ázsiai modell sikere és a latin-amerikai fejlődés kudarcai egyaránt arra utalnak, hogy a világgazdasági felzárkózá...

The paper analyses the Hungarian pension reform, initiated in 1997, as a pioneering measure in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe. In 1998 Hungary was the first CEE country that launched a three-pillar pension system consisting of a state-administered pay-as-you-go pillar as well as mandatory and voluntary private pillars. What enabled the c...

The paper examines development of state capacities and autonomy in East Central Europe during transition, and attempts to establish a relation between state characteristics and trajectories of economic transformation, especially with regard to privatisation and FDI. The assertion is that the quality of state capacities and the degree of state auton...

The paper examines state characteristics and their policy implications in five Central European post-communist countries. It argues that policies on macroeconomic stabilisation, privatisation and FDI had been shaped by state-society relations, which, in turn, had been affected by policy outcomes. Curiously, though, whereas structural and institutio...

The paper attempts to provide an understanding of the role of foreign direct investment (FDI) in East Central Europe (ECE), which is defined as to consist of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia. The paper first looks at the structural economic changes evoked by FDI and the spillover effects that mediate its externalities towa...