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The Political Economy of Illiberalism
Abstract
This chapter introduces a combination of theoretical concepts that inform and motivate the empirical analysis of the next chapters. These are relational class theory, power structure analysis, accumulation strategies, revolving doors, the competition state, dependent development, socio-economic disintegration, economic nationalism, neo-nationalism and the accumulative state. These concepts are the fundamental building blocks of the causal mechanism developed in the book and synthesised in the concluding chapter. Instead of identifying the Hungarian case as a deviation from capitalist norms, the chapter interprets authoritarian politics in the context of capital accumulation, while also rejecting economic determinism that characterises much of critical political economy. Hungary’s authoritarian turn is the result of the reconfiguration of the dominant power bloc and the concomitant change in the accumulation strategy within the context of dependent development. The chapter concludes with a detailed description of the data and methodology.
... Observers have emphasized that there is no uniform neo-authoritarian recipe for governance in the region. While Hungary has been characterized by overtly authoritarian nationalism centered around Viktor Orbán since 2010 (Kelemen, 2017;Scheiring, 2020), Poland exhibits somewhat more pluralistic dynamics both between rivalling factions within the governing party and within the party system in general (Sata & Karolewski, 2020). Under Andrej Babiš' Ano party, Czech politics has, by contrast, been characterized by a newer brand of managerial populism purportedly based on technocratic and entrepreneurial principles (Buštíková & Guasti, 2019). ...
This editorial introduces readers to the thematic issue on organized interests in the context of democratic backsliding in Central and Eastern Europe.
Nationalism is back with a renewed force. Hungary is a virulent example of the new nationalist ascendancy. As the country was a former liberal star pupil, Hungary's neo-nationalist turn has been puzzling researchers for years. This study goes beyond the entrenched polarisations in the literature by highlighting the dynamic interplay between culture, structure and identity. It proposes to conceptualise Hungary's neo-nationalist turn as a Polanyian countermovement against commodification, globalisation and deindustrialisation. The article presents the results of a thematic analysis of 82 interviews with workers in four towns in Hungary's rustbelt and highlights how the multiscalar lived experience of commodifying reforms violated an implicit social contract and changed workers' narrative identities. In the absence of a class-based shared narrative and lacking a viable political tool to control their fate, working-class neo-nationalism emerged as a new narrative identity to express workers' anger and outrage.
This article 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 how 'neoliberal disembedding' fuelled the rightward shift of constituencies who had erstwhile been brought into the fold of liberal hegemony: blue-collar workers, post-peasants and sections of domestic capital. Finally, the article describes the emergence of a new regime of accumulation and Fidesz's strategy of 'authoritarian re-embedding', which relies on 'institutional authoritarianism' and 'authoritarian populism'. This two-pronged approach has so far allowed the ruling party to stabilise illiberal hegemony, even in the face of reforms that have generated discontents and exacerbated social inequality.
Democracy is in crisis around the globe. Hungary was long heralded as a champion of political and economic liberalization in postsocialist Eastern Europe. However, the country recently emerged as a striking example of the current wave of autocratization. Starting from the premise that political regimes are the results of class compromises, in this paper, I argue that Hungary’s authoritarian turn is in part rooted in the reconfiguration of the dominant power bloc and the concomitant change in the state’s strategy. The aim of this article is twofold. Firstly, I analyze the socio-economic roots of Hungary’s authoritarian turn and propose a new, theoretically driven causal narrative challenging and extending existing accounts. Relying on macro-statistics and a new dataset on the economic elite, I describe how the collapse of the class compromise that sustained the post-socialist liberal competition state engendered the revolt of the national bourgeoisie and the rise of the new authoritarian regime of accumulation. Secondly, I offer a new conceptualization regarding the political-economic nature of the new regime: the accumulative state. I empirically identify the political instruments through which the accumulative state props up capital accumulation and the ensuing social conflicts. Instead of portraying Hungary as a divergence from liberal capitalist norms based on a textbook view of markets, I situate authoritarian politics in the logic of capital accumulation. However, I stress that the post-2010 accumulative state serves only short-term capital accumulation and fails to enact long-term structural transformation.
This article re-examines the relationship between the liberal democracy and the free market with special regard to changes caused by globalization. It concludes that the logic of market mechanisms poses a threat to democracy, while the extension of democracy would inevitably limit the freedom of the market and curb capital accumulation. The globalized free market and liberal democracy contradict each other, and their tandem may be the most developed form of capitalism, but not of human society in general.
The relationship between morality and economy has been muddied in the course of disciplinary specialization. While dominant paradigms in economics abstract from the moral dimension, recent approaches to morality and ethics in anthropology neglect the material economy. E. P. Thompson’s “moral economy” has been an influential bridging concept in recent decades, but recent inflationary usage has highlighted shortcomings. Following an overview of the disciplinary debates, the moral dimension of economic life is illustrated in this paper with reference to work as a value between the late 19th and early 21st centuries in Hungary. Contemporary workfare is explored with local examples. It is shown how discourses of work and fairness are being extended into new ethical registers to justify negative attitudes towards a new category of migrants.
This is the first in-depth ethnographic monograph on the New Right in Central and Eastern Europe. It explores the making of right-wing hegemony in Hungary over the last decade by highlighting the spread of racist sensibilities in depressed rural areas, and showing how activists, intellectuals and politicians took advantage of popular racism to empower right-wing agendas and examines the new ruling party's success in stabilizing an illiberal regime. To illuminate these dynamics, I propose an innovative multi-scalar and relational framework, focusing on interaction between social antagonisms emerging on the local level and struggles waged within the political public sphere.
The paper considers the effects of economic globalization on the relationship between national economic and political elites. It is contended that high levels of globalization lead to the de-coupling of economic elites from national political elites and that economic globalization also marginalizes the powers of dependent nation states. The thesis of this paper is that in economically globalized states there is a duality of power. A political elite is legitimated electorally to a national constituency but excluded from the nexus of power by globalized processes. The composition and balance between ruling elites diverge between nation states. A comparison is made between the British and Russian economic elites. The paper considers the composition of the boards of directors of twelve leading companies in the UK and fourteen in Russia. Attention is given to their national and educational background as well as their current or previous links with governments and economic institutions. On the basis of the biographies of directors and other company data, it is concluded that the economic elites in British companies are global in composition and decoupled from the UK’s political elites. Globalization moves capitalism out of a nation state framework and neo-liberalism legitimates markets over states. Such de-coupling leads to increasing political weakness of national political elites and stimulates movements for economic nationalism. Russia is considered a hybrid system with many leading companies being closely integrated with the political elite but others are more autonomous and multinational in control and ownership. The economic structure is the basis of Russia’s economic nationalism. Political leadership is considered a key variable in tipping the balance.
This paper explains the election of Donald Trump as the product of a confluence of historical factors rather than the distinctive appeal of the victor himself. By paying particular attention to the geography of unusual voting behavior the analytical question comes into view: why did so much uncharacteristic voting occur in the Rust Belt states of the upper Midwest? It is impossible to answer this question adequately using conventional categorical attributes. The usual hypotheses of “economic anxiety” and white revanchism are unable to account for sudden shifts in the voting behavior of both white and black voters in post-industrial territories. Instead, it is necessary to turn to the history of the region and the institutional apparatus that connected voters there to the federal government and the Democratic Party. From this perspective we can see that the active dismantling of the Fordist social order set the region on a divergent path from the rest of the country. But this path had no political outlet as the Democratic Party reoriented the class and geographic base of the party and pursued policies that would magnify the region’s difficulties rather than alleviate its circumstances. Moreover, the elaborate institutional ties that connected the region’s voters to the Democratic Party and the federal government meant that the political implications of regional decline would be muted. However, as these institutions frayed, Rust Belt voters were made available to candidates that challenged the policy consensus that had done so much damage to the region. The election was decided by a Rust Belt Revolt that unified black and white working-class voters against Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party.
With the contemporary crisis of liberal democracy and the rise of illiberalism in the aftermath of the global financial crisis we are witnessing a renewed interest in structuralist theories that conceptualize the inherent tensions of modernization, crises and democracy. In my paper I attempt to show that Polanyi’s thinking represents such a framework that can be updated to fit contemporary
realities both in core and peripheral countries. After the introduction I reconstruct Polanyi’s political stance regarding democracy, socialism and the market based on a reading of his political speeches as well as
other non-academic texts. Next I will bring to the fore his often neglected views regarding the commodification of money and the tensions between international finance and democracy. In the fourth
section of the paper I introduce the notion of dependent financialization to make Polanyi’s theory of money compatible with non-core capitalist economies. The Polanyian theory of money allows
us to formulate hypotheses about political dynamics in different varieties of core and peripheral capitalisms as well. In the final section of my paper I conclude that Polanyi’s theory of the double movement
and fictitious commodification can only be understood and applied to empirical analysis once we bring it into dialogue with his political views. Polanyi urges us to preserve the market by protecting the
economy and society from the damages of excessive commodification: markets need to be protected from themselves.
This book is an expanded and revised edition of the author's critically acclaimed volume Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences. In twenty-six succinct chapters, Jon Elster provides an account of the nature of explanation in the social sciences. He offers an overview of key explanatory mechanisms in the social sciences, relying on hundreds of examples and drawing on a large variety of sources - psychology, behavioral economics, biology, political science, historical writings, philosophy and fiction. Written in accessible and jargon-free language, Elster aims at accuracy and clarity while eschewing formal models. In a provocative conclusion, Elster defends the centrality of qualitative social sciences in a two-front war against soft (literary) and hard (mathematical) forms of obscurantism.
In the early 1980s, many observers, argued that powerful organized economic interests and social democratic parties created successful mixed economies promoting economic growth, full employment, and a modicum of social equality. The present book assembles scholars with formidable expertise in the study of advanced capitalist politics and political economy to reexamine this account from the vantage point of the second half of the 1990s. The authors find that the conventional wisdom no longer adequately reflects the political and economic realities. Advanced democracies have responded in path-dependent fashion to such novel challenges as technological change, intensifying international competition, new social conflict, and the erosion of established patterns of political mobilization. The book rejects, however, the currently widespread expectation that 'internationalization' makes all democracies converge on similar political and economic institutions and power relations. Diversity among capitalist democracies persists, though in a different fashion than in the 'Golden Age' of rapid economic growth after World War II.
The article presents a theory of class conflict between workers and capitalists who pursue their material interests under a form of societal organization that combines private ownership of instruments of production with representative political institutions. There exist economic and political conditions under which both classes would simultaneously choose courses of action that constitute a class compromise: workers consent to the institution of profit and capitalists to democratic institutions through which workers can effectively press claims for material gains. When these conditions hold and a compromise is in force, the role of the state consists in institutionalizing, coordinating, and enforcing the terms of a compromise that represents the preferences of workers as well as capitalists.
This book picks up where Karl Polanyi's study of economic and political change left off. Building upon Polanyi's conception of the double movement, Blyth analyzes the two periods of deep seated institutional change that characterized the twentieth century: the 1930s and the 1970s. Blyth views both sets of changes as part of the same dynamic. In the 1930s labor reacted against the exigencies of the market and demanded state action to mitigate the market's effects by 'embedding liberalism.' In the 1970s, those who benefited least from such 'embedding' institutions, namely business, reacted against these constraints and sought to overturn that institutional order. Blyth demonstrates the critical role economic ideas played in making institutional change possible. Great Transformations rethinks the relationship between uncertainty, ideas, and interests, achieving profound new insights on how, and under what conditions, institutional change takes place.
Poverty, increased inequality, and social exclusion are back on the political agenda, not only as a consequence of the Great Recession of 2008, but also because of a seemingly structural trend towards increased inequality in advanced industrial societies that has persisted since the 1970s. Policies in labor markets, social policy, and political representation are strongly linked in the creation, widening, and deepening of insider-outsider divides--a process known as dualization. While it is certainly not the only driver of increasing inequality, its development across multiple domains makes dualization one of the most important current trends affecting developed societies. The comparative perspective of this book provides insights into why Nordic countries witness lower levels of insider-outsider divides, whereas in continental, liberal and southern welfare states, they are more likely to constitute a core characteristic of the political economy. Most importantly, the comparisons presented in this book point to the crucial importance of politics and political choice in driving and shaping the social outcomes of deindustrialization. While increased structural labor market divides can be found across all countries, governments have a strong responsibility in shaping the distributive consequences of these labor market changes. Insider-outsider divides are ultimately the result of political choice. A landmark publication, this volume is geared for faculty and graduate students of economics, political science, social policy, and sociology, as well as policymakers concerned with increasing inequality in a period of deep economic and social crisis. (Résumé éditeur)
Process-tracing in social science is a method for studying causal mechanisms linking causes with outcomes. This enables the researcher to make strong inferences about how a cause (or set of causes) contributes to producing an outcome. Derek Beach and Rasmus Brun Pedersen introduce a refined definition of process-tracing, differentiating it into three distinct variants and explaining the applications and limitations of each. The authors develop the underlying logic of process-tracing, including how one should understand causal mechanisms and how Bayesian logic enables strong within-case inferences. They provide instructions for identifying the variant of process-tracing most appropriate for the research question at hand and a set of guidelines for each stage of the research process. © 2019 by Derek Beach and Rasmus Brun Pedersen. All rights reserved.
The modern term economy is associated above all with market exchange. But it derives from the Greek oikos, which for Aristotle referred to the well-managed estate, able to withstand the forces of supply and demand by virtue of a high degree of self-sufficiency. The paper explores the long-term discontinuous expansion of the principle of price-forming markets (in the sense of Karl Polanyi) at the expense of self-sufficiency in a zone of the Great Hungarian Plain where the author has carried out long-term field research. The historically “backward” region of the Danube-Tisza interfluve has been integrated into wider historical processes through different forms of market exchange, first under peripheral variants of capitalism, then in the later decades of socialism, and recently under neoliberal capitalism in a political climate of “illiberal democracy” or populism. The paper analyses continuity and change across these epochs at the societal level, with ethnographic illustrations. In addition to Polanyi’s notions of “market society” and “double movement”, it draws theoretically on Ferenc Erdei’s agenda to overcome rural backwardness through embourgeoisement; it is found that the interests of the rural population were more effectively promoted in the decades of market socialism than in any other period before or since.
Cambridge Core - Political Economy - From Triumph to Crisis - by Hilary Appel
Recent liberal political science analysis has highlighted media, manipulation, and populist political trickery in the apparently sudden rise of the new Right in Europe and the USA. I suggest that a robust engagement with the actual social transformations over which liberalism has presided since 1989 is imperative. Anthropological work on class processes and the rise of neo-nationalist populism in Central and Eastern Europe has been strong in developing a more relational, processual, and embedded vision. In the current paper, I am looking at the phases and spaces of the rise of illiberalism as a popular political sensibility in Central and Eastern Europe. In particular, I am interested in its gradual upscaling to the level of the nation state and, through the “Visegrad bloc” to the EU. I argue that both the emergence and step-by-step upscaling of illiberal political sensibilities are explained by class relational processes and the regionally uneven Polanyi-type “countermovements” against liberalizations that they brought forth.
Populism may seem like it has come out of nowhere, but it has been on the rise for a while. I argue that economic history and economic theory both provide ample grounds for anticipating that advanced stages of economic globalization would produce a political backlash. While the backlash may have been predictable, the specific form it took was less so. I distinguish between left-wing and right-wing variants of populism, which differ with respect to the societal cleavages that populist politicians highlight. The first has been predominant in Latin America, and the second in Europe. I argue that these different reactions are related to the relative salience of different types of globalization shocks.
Althusser extends Marx's notion of reproduction of the means of production beyond the production system to the Ideological State Apparatues and the Repressive State Apparatuses. The Ideologocial State Apparatuses, especially education, ensure that we are reproduced as subjects of the ruling ideology.
"Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence...Ideology has a material existence...always exists in an apparatus, and its practice, or practices" (Althusser developing the notion of ideology)
The theory of imperialist capitalism, as is well known, has so far attained its most significant treatment in Lenin’s works. This is not only because Lenin attempts to explain transformations of the capitalist economies that occurrred during the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth, but is mainly because of the political and historical implications contained in his interpretations. In fact, the descriptive arguments of Lenin’s theory of imperialism were borrowed from Hobson’s analysis. Other writers had already presented evidence of the international expansion of the capitalist economies and nations. Nevertheless, Lenin, inspired by Marx’s views, was able to bring together evidence to the effect that economic expansion is meaningless if we do not take into consideration the political and historical aspects with which economic factors are intimately related. From Lenin’s perspective, imperialism is a new form of the capitalist mode of production. This new form cannot be considered a different mode of economic organization, insofar as capital accumulation based on private ownership of the means of production and exploitation of the labor force remain the basic features of the system. But its significance is that of a new stage of capitalism.
After collecting qualitative data from in-depth interviews, focus groups, or field observations, students and researchers often struggle to make sense of it. This step-by-step guide draws on the authors' many years of experience carrying out qualitative research and conducting trainings on the subject. Their book describes how to analyze qualitative data in a systematic and rigorous way. The authors introduce and outline applied thematic analysis, an inductive approach that draws on established and innovative theme-based techniques suited to the applied research context. Chapters follow the sequence of activities in the analysis process and also include discussions of mixed methods, choosing the most appropriate software, and how to write up and present the results.
"This book presents what all of the books I've tried to use in the past have failed to present—how to analyze qualitative data."—Catherine C. Schifter, Temple University
"This book does a wonderful job of explaining how important thematic analysis is for producing good research, and it uses rich and detailed examples to do it."—Matthew Hartley, University of Pennsylvania
By the early twenty-first century neo-nationalist forces have established themselves in a number of the world's large regions and subcontinents. From Australia to South Asia, in Eastern and Western Europe, comparable parties and movements have positioned themselves in national parliaments and governments, with some considerable impact on state power. In contrast to right-wing extremist parties in the past, these recent movements mostly operate within legal parliamentary channels, using essentialized notions of local culture to mobilize against real and alleged threats to local identities of status, gender, religion, nationhood and ethnicity. Prompted by this near-simultaneous rise to political influence of more than a dozen apparently similar parties across Western Europe, this collection offers a range of European case studies with selected global examples, such as the Front National, the late Pim Fortuyn, India and the BJP, and Pauline Hanson and her One Nation Party in Australia. It takes up the theoretical and methodological challenges posed by this phenomenon and asks what distinctive contributions anthropology might make to its study.
Following recent calls for a more self-aware and historically sensitive sociology this article reflects on the concept of deindustrialisation and industrial change in this spirit. Using EP Thompson’s classic The Making of the English Working Class and his examination of industrialising culture with its stress on experience, the article asks how these insights might be of value in understanding contemporary processes of deindustrialisation and work. Drawing on a range of sociological, cultural and literary studies it conceptualises the differences and similarities between two historic moments of industrial change and loss. In particular it draws on the literary concept of the ‘half-life of deindustrialisation’ to explore these periods. The article has important implications for how we think about contemporary and historical industrial decline.
The transnational capitalist class (TCC) as a theoretical concept and an empirical reality has its origins in theories of capitalist globalization developed since the 1960s. Traditional Marxist theories of the international bourgeoisie tend to be conceptualized in state-centrist terms and to focus mainly on business leaders, usually big capitalists, and their corporations in rich and powerful countries exploiting capitalists, workers and peasants in poor countries. The transnational corporation (TNC), in contrast, transcends national class structures and, for some researchers, includes groups whose members do not directly own the means of production but, nevertheless, directly serve the interests of global capitalism.
In this article, we elucidate two new mechanisms for the rise in earnings inequality during post-socialist transition. First, the integration of transition country firms into globalized production networks (GPNs) should increase inequality independent of foreign direct investment (FDI). Second, because EU integration hastened the transition from Soviet-era labor-market practices, the distributional effects of private markets and world-economic integration should be larger among acceding countries. A longitudinal analysis of Gini coefficients among sixteen transition countries from 1991 to 2009 supports these interventions: GPN integration increases inequality independent of FDI, and both private markets and world-economic integration have stronger effects in EU transition countries. These results are robust to a host of alternative explanations, to varying operationalizations of the labor-market effects of EU integration, and to alternative estimators. Through counterfactual analysis, we show that inequality would have increased less dramatically in the absence of EU integration.
This paper documents and accounts for the globalization of the so-called national bourgeoisie in the late twentieth century. A substantial and growing body of sociological literature holds that firms and investors from the developing world have been denationalized, neutered, or destroyed by their efforts to penetrate international markets - and that cross-national economic competition is therefore giving way to transnational class conflict over time. By way of contrast, I hold that not only peripheral capitalists but their elected and appointed representatives are compelled to undertake large-scale, fixed investments, exploit their competitive advantages, and challenge foreign firms - and their respective representatives - on their own soil by the very logic of capitalist competition, and that the aforementioned challenges will occur on political as well as economic terrain.
The current era of global urbanization is defined by a convergence of economic and political crises requiring urgent sociological reflection on the meaning of the 'urban' today. This article responds to the current rethinking of worldwide processes of urbanization sparked off by Brenner, and Brenner and Schmid, arguing for a renewed sociological approach to urban formations that probes beyond the economic logic of urban 'de-territorialization', towards the capricious life-worlds and forms of planetary organization that define the urban. We pursue a theory of the 'urban vortex' to capture the maelstrom of disorienting crises since 2008, and explicate the social formations implicated in the construction, materialization and practice of power and transgression in cities today. Our aim is to consider what forms of social change emerge in volatile, intense and centralized dynamics (the urban vortex), and how this might relate to arrangements of interconnectivity, particularity and variegation (the planetary). The article highlights three prominent processes of urban social formation: accumulation, stratification and hyper-diversity-reinstating the need to theorize the centrality of the city within the formations of twenty-first-century capitalism.
Political history in the industrial world has indeed ended, argues this pioneering study, but the winner has been social democracy - an ideology and political movement that has been as influential as it has been misunderstood. Berman looks at the history of social democracy from its origins in the late nineteenth century to today and shows how it beat out competitors such as classical liberalism, orthodox Marxism, and its cousins, Fascism and National Socialism by solving the central challenge of modern politics - reconciling the competing needs of capitalism and democracy. Bursting on to the scene in the interwar years, the social democratic model spread across Europe after the Second World War and formed the basis of the postwar settlement. This is a study of European social democracy that rewrites the intellectual and political history of the modern era while putting contemporary debates about globalization in their proper intellectual and historical context.
Charles Tilly’s Democracy identifies the general processes causing democratization and de-democratization at a national level across the world over the last few hundred years. It singles out integration of trust networks into public politics, insulation of public politics from categorical inequality, and suppression of autonomous coercive power centres as crucial processes. Through analytic narratives and comparisons of multiple regimes, mostly since World War II, this book makes the case for recasting current theories of democracy, democratization and de-democratization.
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Over the past few decades serious reservations have been expressed about the explanatory power of sociological theory and research. In this important book, leading social theorist Peter Hedström outlines the foundations of an analytically oriented sociology that seeks to address this criticism. Building on his earlier influential contributions to contemporary debates, Professor Hedström argues for a systematic development of sociological theory so that it has the explanatory power and precision to inform sociological research and understanding. He discusses various mechanisms of action and interaction and shows how strong links can be forged between the micro and the macro, and between theory and empirical research. Combining approaches to theory and methodology and using extensive examples to illustrate how they might be applied, this clear, concise and original book will appeal to a broad range of social scientists.