Books by Gabor Scheiring
Palgrave Macmillan, 2020
This book is the product of three years of empirical research, four years in politics, and a life... more This book is the product of three years of empirical research, four years in politics, and a lifetime in a country experiencing three different regimes. Transcending disciplinary boundaries, it provides a fresh answer to a simple yet profound question: why has liberal democracy retreated? Scheiring argues that Hungary's new hybrid authoritarian regime emerged as a political response to the tensions of globalisation. He demonstrates how Viktor Orbán's Fidesz exploited the rising nationalism among the working-class casualties of deindustrialisation and the national bourgeoisie to consolidate illiberal hegemony. As the world faces a new wave of autocratisation, Hungary's lessons become relevant across the globe, and this book represents a significant contribution to understanding challenges to democracy. This work will be useful to students and researchers across political sociology, political science, economics and social anthropology, as well democracy advocates.
'Gabor Scheiring's book is a gift to all of us trying to understand a key puzzle of the 21st-century political-economy: how are regressive authoritarian regimes successfully constructed within formal democratic facades? Conceptually bold, theoretically nuanced, built on firm empirical foundations, the book is a model of how to research and theorize authoritarianism.' (Peter B. Evans, Professor Emeritus, Department of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley)
'This book is a tour de force, illuminating the internal hypocrisies of Hungary's post-2010 regime and the external complicities that have sustained it for the last decade.' (Chris Hann, Director, Max Planck Cambridge Centre for Ethics, Economy and Social Change, University of Cambridge)
‘If Hungary is the avant-garde case of illiberalism in Europe, this book is the ultimate analysis of it. The message: it’s not immigrants, it’s class! A model of the new cultural political economy.’ (Don Kalb, Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen)
‘This book will set the agenda for the study of right-wing populism, an essential reading for those wishing to understand this phenomenon in Central Europe and indeed the world.’ (Lawrence P. King, Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts Amherst)
‘Scheiring rehabilitates the concept of class in the post-socialist context and develops his fascinating analysis on three pillars – class, state, dependency – interpreted in a novel way.’ (András Bozóki, Professor of Political Science, Central European University)
Journal - EN by Gabor Scheiring
British Journal of Political Science, 2024
The literature on populism is divided on whether economic factors are significant and robust caus... more The literature on populism is divided on whether economic factors are significant and robust causes of populism. To clarify this, we performed the first systematic review and meta-analysis of the evidence of a causal association between economic insecurity and populism. We combined database searches with searching the citations of eligible studies and recently published reviews. We identified and reviewed thirty-six studies and presented a concise narrative summary and numerical synthesis of the key findings. Although we found significant heterogeneity in several dimensions, all studies reported a significant causal association. A recurrent magnitude was that economic insecurity explained around one-third of recent surges in populism. We tested for publication bias by conducting a funnel-plot asymmetry test and a density discontinuity test of the distribution of t-statistics. We found significant evidence of publication bias; however, the causal association between economic insecurity and populism remains significant after controlling for it.
Economic Sociology: Perspectives and Conversations, 2023
In this essay, I extend on my previous analyses of the political economy of populism, rooting the... more In this essay, I extend on my previous analyses of the political economy of populism, rooting the argument in the growth model perspective. I deploy the conceptual apparatus developed by Baccaro and Pontusson (2022) and Amable and Palombarini (2009) to analyze the politics of growth models in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. I show how the dominant social blocs constructed the institutional underpinnings of the model and managed its tensions by pacifying the relative losers in the popular classes and among the ranks of the national business class. I argue that the different forms of politically managing the growth model resulted in various degrees of economic and social disintegration, which opened the way for varying populist social coalitions that modified the growth model to different degrees.
Cambridge Journal of Economics, 2023
An unprecedented mortality crisis struck Eastern Europe during the 1990s, causing around seven mi... more An unprecedented mortality crisis struck Eastern Europe during the 1990s, causing around seven million excess deaths. We enter the debate about the causes of this crisis by performing the first quantitative analysis of the association between deindustrialisation and mortality in Eastern Europe. We develop a theoretical framework identifying deindustrialisation as a process of social disintegration rooted in the lived experience of shock therapy. We test this theory relying on a novel multilevel dataset, fitting survival and panel models covering 52 towns and 42,800 people in 1989-95 in Hungary and 514 towns in European Russia in 1991-99. The results show that deindustrialisation was directly associated with male mortality and indirectly mediated by hazardous drinking as a stress-coping strategy. The association is not a spurious result of a legacy of dysfunctional working-class health culture aggravated by low alcohol prices during the early years of the transition. Both countries experienced deindustrialisation, but social and economic policies have offset Hungary's more immense industrial employment loss. The results are relevant to health crises in other regions, including the deaths of despair plaguing the American Rust Belt. Policies addressing the underlying causes of stress and despair are vital to save lives during painful economic transformations.
Annual Review of Sociology, 2022
A socially patterned epidemic of deaths of despair is a signal feature of American society in the... more A socially patterned epidemic of deaths of despair is a signal feature of American society in the twenty-first century, involving rising mortality from substance use disorders and self-harm at the bottom of the class structure. In the present review, we compare this population health crisis to that which ravaged Eastern Europe at the tail end of the previous century. We chart their common upstream causes: violent social dislocations wrought by rapid economic change and attendant public policies. By reviewing the extant social scientific and epidemiological literature, we probe a collection of dominant yet competing explanatory frameworks and spotlight avenues for future sociological contributions to this growing but underdeveloped domain of research. Deaths of despair are deeply rooted in socioeconomic dislocations that shape health behavior and other proximate causes of health inequality; therefore, sociology has great untapped potential in analyzing the social causes of deaths of despair. Comparative sociological research could significantly extend the extant public health and economics scholarship on deaths of despair by exploring the variegated lived experience of socioeconomic change in different institutional contexts, relying on sociological concepts such as fundamental causes, social reproduction, social disintegration, alienation, or anomie.
Theory and Society, 2022
Deindustrialization is a major burden on workers' health in many countries, calling for theoretic... more Deindustrialization is a major burden on workers' health in many countries, calling for theoretically informed sociological analysis. Here, we present a novel neoclassical sociological synthesis of the lived experience of deindustrialization. We conceptualize industry as a social institution whose disintegration has widespread implications for the social fabric. Combining Durkheimian and Marxian categories, we show that deindustrialization generates ruptures in economic production, which entail job and income loss, increased exploitation, social inequality, and the disruption of services. These ruptures spill over to the field of social reproduction, generating material deprivation, job strain, fatalism, increased domestic workload, anomie, community disintegration, and alienation. These ruptures in social reproduction are sources of psychosocial stress, through which deindustrialization gets embodied as ill health and dysfunctional health behavior. We substantiate this framework through the extensive qualitative thematic analysis of 82 life history interviews in Hungary's rust belt. Keywords Deindustrialization • Deaths of despair • Durkheim • Health • Marx • Neoclassical sociology Classical sociology emerged in response to the experience of capitalist transformations in the 19th century that brought rising incomes but also intense suffering in industrial centers. Measured by health, the biggest social transformation of the 20th century, the transition from state socialism to capitalism, was also a source of
Socio-Economic Review
This article offers a new conceptual framework to analyze the national-populist mutation of neoli... more This article offers a new conceptual framework to analyze the national-populist mutation of neoliberalism in foreign-investment-dependent economies. By extending the emerging literature on the mutation of neoliberalism, the article challenges the conventional view of populism as a revolt against liberal capitalism and businesses. Following theory-testing process tracing, the article substantiates this theoretical framework through a detailed mixed-method study of the strategic test case of Viktor Orbán's Hungary. Utilizing new empirical material on businesses and policymakers, the article shows how the polarization of the business class rooted in global dependency structures, in interaction with a rising group of nationalist technocrats, has contributed to the national-populist mutation of neoliberalism. Nationalpopulist neoliberalism entails a new power bloc, a new compromise between national and transnational capital. It has preserved the core tenets of neoliberalism while modifying some of its peripheral elements and cutting back on avant-garde excesses to ensure the political viability of neoliberalism.
Europe-Asia Studies, 2021
The rise of populism has cast doubt on the sustainability of the marriage of liberal democracy an... more The rise of populism has cast doubt on the sustainability of the marriage of liberal democracy and neoliberal capitalism. There is an urgent need to understand how neoliberal developmental bottlenecks foster populist social coalitions. This essay analyses how the combination of dependent development and various structures of dependency governance have contributed to different levels of socio-economic disintegration, engendering different populist countermovements in Central and Eastern Europe. These processes fostered exclusionary neoliberal populism with strong illiberalism in Hungary, welfare chauvinist populism with weak illiberalism in Poland, technocratic neoliberal populism without illiberalism in the Czech Republic and entrenched neoliberal populism with contained illiberalism in Slovakia.
European Politics and Society, 2021
Has a post-neoliberal policy regime emerged from the challenges to neoliberalism that have accomp... more Has a post-neoliberal policy regime emerged from the challenges to neoliberalism that have accompanied the rise of nationalism and populism in some Eastern and Central European countries? Why has the political organization of these challenges to neoliberalism endured in some countries but not in others? By drawing on a mix of primary and secondary sources culled from the institutional, political and economic realities of Hungary and Romania, this paper makes two claims. First, the article suggests that these transformations have amounted to a distinctive variety of neoliberalism that can be dubbed ‘national-neoliberalism.’ At its core one finds the slightly modified old goals of neoliberal orthodoxy embedded into a protective cocoon of orthodox and unorthodox economic policy instruments and institutions. The second claim of the paper is that the political organization of the national-neoliberal project was resilient in Hungary but not in Romania. The evidence suggests that this variation owes not only to the fact that the ‘national’ elements of national-neoliberalism had protections against the bond markets. While this factor was indeed critical, the resilience of Hungarian national-neoliberalism seems to have been made possible by the fact that its proponents could manage a broader social bloc and deploy techno-political capabilities that bolstered their political power relative to that of challengers. In contrast, the challengers to orthodox ("globalist") neoliberalism did not possess these characteristics in Romania. As such, the paper rejects the hypothesis of a nationalist-heterodox successor to neoliberalism and takes a first cut at a theory of policy resilience for national-neoliberalism.
Global Dialogue, 2021
The coronavirus pandemic helped temporarily slow populism’s rise and relieve the pressure on stat... more The coronavirus pandemic helped temporarily slow populism’s rise and relieve the pressure on status quo politics, contributing to Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential race. However, Donald Trump’s legacy goes beyond his White House occupancy. Trumpism – and national populism more generally – is an expression of the existential crisis of contemporary capitalism. A second national-populist wave and a potentially even worse version of Trumpism is inevitable if – lured by centrism and blocked by obstructing Republicans – Biden’s administration does not fix underlying social tensions and economic dislocations. Sociology can aid politics in this effort. However, one specific sign of capitalism’s existential crisis has so far escaped most sociologists’ attention: workers’ declining life expectancy in deindustrialized, Rust Belt areas and the accompanying deepening of health inequalities.
Journal of Australian Political Economy, 2021
Class analysis is back. Skyrocketing inequalities, the stagnation and marginalisation of the trad... more Class analysis is back. Skyrocketing inequalities, the stagnation and marginalisation of the traditional working class, and the right-wing nationalist revolt have pushed issues of class into the limelight. The 2010s saw the publication of numerous books on the working class, causing quite a stir both in academia and public discourse (see the review by Bergfeld 2019). These phenomena challenged the view of 'classless' societies, dominant from the 1980s to the 2000s, that suggested individual success was determined solely by individual abilities or ethnic/gender hierarchies. Fitting into this class renaissance is Michael Lind's provocative, incisive, yet structurally flawed book on class war. Lind is both an academic and a journalist, whose writings always draw public attention across the political spectrum in the US. He is an excellent writer. His sentences are short and punchy, his argument is clear, and his message is dear to the heart of a reader who is sensitive to the problems of our times: 'Demagogic populism is a symptom. Technocratic neoliberalism is the disease. Democratic pluralism is the cure' (p. xv).
Sociology, 2020
Nationalism is back with a renewed force. Hungary is a virulent example of the new nationalist as... more 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.
International Sociology, 2020
This article presents and empirically substantiates a theoretical account explaining the making a... more 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.
Sociology: Theory, Methods, Marketing (Institute of Sociology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine), 2020
Authoritarian capitalist practices are gaining foothold not only in non-democratic states, such a... more Authoritarian capitalist practices are gaining foothold not only in non-democratic states, such as China but even in countries with strong liberal institutions. From Greece to the US, an increasing number of countries shows its symptoms: curtailing democratic contestation in order to stabilise accumulation. Hungary is one of the most puzzling cases. Hungarian elites followed the good governance blueprints of international institutions, implementing liberal political and economic reforms between 1990 and 2010. For long, the country was considered to be a frontrunner of the third wave of democratisation, yet now it is seen as the prime example of the illiberal turn. Orbán's political-economic model, hybrid authoritarian capitalism institutionalised by the accumulative state, has been stable for eight years now. To understand the emergence, stability and potential vulnerability of this regime, this article digs deeper into the contradictions of post-socialist liberal policies.
Rupture Magazine, 2019
In this article we seek to shed light on the decline of labour politics in Hungary,, which has be... more In this article we seek to shed light on the decline of labour politics in Hungary,, which has been laid bare in a particularly stark manner by the failure of the ‘slave law’ protests and the Left’s dismal electoral performance at the last European parliamentary elections. We focus on political-economic processes that played out over a longer period of time: the generation of working-class discontents under the auspices of a neoliberal Left, the gradual fragmentation of labour in a dualised dependent economy, the rearticulation of working-class solidarities in the idiom of the nation and the subsequent incorporation of some popular demands into ‘illiberal’ politics. Our endeavour to theorise the demise of labour – and more broadly: class politics – we rely on the work of Karl Polanyi and more particularly his conceptualisation of the ‘double movement’ through which he sought to grasp the process whereby society reacts to the vicissitudes of marketisation. Elsewhere, we have demonstrated that Polanyi’s theory can be adapted to the context of contemporary financialised capitalism on Europe’s Eastern periphery and its usefulness for highlighting the tensions of postsocialist capitalist democracies. We combine Polanyi’s framework with neo-Gramscian political economy and power structure theory to describe the power blocs that compete to take control of the state and their strategies vis-à-vis capital and labour. To substantiate our theoretical narrative, we rely on empirical research we carried out over the last five years, as well as the existing literature. First, we outline the process whereby labour relations became disembedded during Hungary’s re-integration into the global capitalist economy under neoliberal governments. We then describe Fidesz’s strategy of authoritarian re-embedding, which combines pre-emptive repression with authoritarian populism, allowing the hegemonic ruling party to incorporate workers while neutralising discontents. We end by arguing that these processes have created a structural trap for labour politics.
Geoforum, May 9, 2019
Democracy is in crisis around the globe. Hungary was long heralded as a champion of political and... more 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.
The Lancet Global Health, 2018
Background: Research on the health outcomes of globalisation and economic transition has yielded ... more Background: Research on the health outcomes of globalisation and economic transition has yielded conflicting results, partly due to methodological and data limitations. Specifically, the outcomes of changes in foreign investment and state ownership need to be examined using multilevel data, linking macro-effects and micro-effects. We exploited the natural experiment offered by the Hungarian economic transition by means of a multilevel study designed to address these gaps in the scientific literature.
Methods: For this indirect demographic, retrospective cohort study, we collected multilevel data related to Hungary between 1995 and 2004 from the PrivMort database and other sources at the town, company, and individual level to assess the relation between the dominant company ownership of a town and mortality. We grouped towns into three ownership categories: dominant state, domestic private, and foreign ownership. We did population surveys in these towns to collect data on vital status and other characteristics of survey respondents' relatives. We assessed the relation between dominant ownership and mortality at the individual level. We used discrete-time survival modelling, adjusting for town-level and individual-level confounders, with clustered SEs.
Findings: Of 83 eligible towns identified, we randomly selected 52 for inclusion in the analysis and analysed ownership data from 262 companies within these towns. Additionally, between June 16, 2014, and Dec 22, 2014, we collected data on 78 622 individuals from the 52 towns, of whom 27 694 were considered eligible. After multivariable adjustment, we found that women living in towns with prolonged state ownership had significantly lower odds of dying than women living in towns dominated by domestic private ownership (odds ratio [OR] 0·74, 95% CI 0·61–0·90) or by foreign investment (OR 0·80, 0·69–0·92).
Interpretation: Prolonged state ownership was associated with protection of life chances during the post-socialist transformation for women. The indirect economic benefits of foreign investment do not translate automatically into better health without appropriate industrial and social policies.
Sociology of Health and Illness, 2018
An unprecedented mortality crisis befell the former socialist countries between 1989 and 1995, re... more An unprecedented mortality crisis befell the former socialist countries between 1989 and 1995, representing one of the greatest demographic shocks of the period after the Second World War. While it is likely that country-level variation in the post-socialist mortality crisis in Eastern Europe can be explained by a constellation of political and socioeconomic factors, no comprehensive review of the existing scholarly attempts at explaining these factors exists. We review 39 cross-national multi-variable peer reviewed studies of social determinants of mortality in post-socialist Europe in order to assess the social factors behind the post-socialist mortality crisis, determine the gaps in the existing literature and to make suggestions for future research. We propose a novel methodology to determine the relative importance of variables based on the ratio of significant to insignificant findings for each variable. The literature identifies inequality, welfare payments, religious composition, democracy, economic performance, and unemployment as the leading factors that have a significant influence on mortality outcomes. Existing crosscountry studies fail to establish a definitive connection between mortality and diets, drinking patterns, liberalisation, trust, health expenditure and war. We also point out that the level of analysis is not a neutral methodological choice but might influence the results themselves.
Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, 2017
Eastern Europe underwent one of the most dramatic economic and demographic changes in recent hist... more Eastern Europe underwent one of the most dramatic economic and demographic changes in recent history with skyrocketing mortality rates in some countries during the 1990s. The case of Hungary among the post-socialist transition countries is puzzling for several reasons. Although the Hungarian transition has often been characterized as smooth and successful, a look at the human dimension of the transformation reveals large costs and a slow improvement. Based on the analysis of 29 articles we provide a systematic review of the empirical evidence about the social determinants of mortality in post-socialist Hungary establishing a hierarchy of causes. Socio-economic position, mental health, social capital, alcohol consumption, stress and social integration are the most important explanatory variables that received attention by the researchers. Although economic policies might have played a central role in the rise of mortality there is no empirical research on the political economy of health in Hungary. No critical analysis of post-socialism can be complete without assessing the human costs of economic transformation. Social scientists have much to learn from social epidemiologists who have designed robust methodologies and complex theoretical frameworks to analyse the political economic determinants of health.
The Lancet Public Health, 2017
Background
Population-level data suggest that economic disruptions in the early 1990s increased ... more Background
Population-level data suggest that economic disruptions in the early 1990s increased working-age male mortality in post-Soviet countries. This study uses individual-level data, using an indirect estimation method, to test the hypothesis that fast privatisation increased mortality in Russia.
Methods
In this retrospective cohort study, we surveyed surviving relatives of individuals who lived through the post-communist transition to retrieve demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of their parents, siblings, and male partners. The survey was done within the framework of the European Research Council (ERC) project PrivMort (The Impact of Privatization on the Mortality Crisis in Eastern Europe). We surveyed relatives in 20 mono-industrial towns in the European part of Russia (ie, the landmass to the west of the Urals). We compared ten fast-privatised and ten slow-privatised towns selected using propensity score matching. In the selected towns, population surveys were done in which respondents provided information about vital status, sociodemographic and socioeconomic characteristics and health-related behaviours of their parents, two eldest siblings (if eligible), and first husbands or long-term partners. We calculated indirect age-standardised mortality rates in fast and slow privatised towns and then, in multivariate analyses, calculated Poisson proportional incidence rate ratios to estimate the effect of rapid privatisation on all-cause mortality risk.
Findings
Between November, 2014, and March, 2015, 21 494 households were identified in 20 towns. Overall, 13 932 valid interviews were done (with information collected for 38 339 relatives [21 634 men and 16 705 women]). Fast privatisation was strongly associated with higher working-age male mortality rates both between 1992 and 1998 (age-standardised mortality ratio in men aged 20–69 years in fast vs slow privatised towns: 1·13, SMR 0·83, 95% CI 0·77–0·88 vs 0·73, 0·69–0·77, respectively) and from 1999 to 2006 (1·15, 0·91, 0·86–0·97 vs 0·79, 0·75–0·84). After adjusting for age, marital status, material deprivation history, smoking, drinking and socioeconomic status, working-age men in fast-privatised towns experienced 13% higher mortality than in slow-privatised towns (95% CI 1–26).
Interpretation
The rapid pace of privatisation was a significant factor in the marked increase in working-age male mortality in post-Soviet Russia. By providing compelling evidence in support of the health benefits of a slower pace of privatisation, this study can assist policy makers in making informed decisions about the speed and scope of government interventions.
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Books by Gabor Scheiring
'Gabor Scheiring's book is a gift to all of us trying to understand a key puzzle of the 21st-century political-economy: how are regressive authoritarian regimes successfully constructed within formal democratic facades? Conceptually bold, theoretically nuanced, built on firm empirical foundations, the book is a model of how to research and theorize authoritarianism.' (Peter B. Evans, Professor Emeritus, Department of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley)
'This book is a tour de force, illuminating the internal hypocrisies of Hungary's post-2010 regime and the external complicities that have sustained it for the last decade.' (Chris Hann, Director, Max Planck Cambridge Centre for Ethics, Economy and Social Change, University of Cambridge)
‘If Hungary is the avant-garde case of illiberalism in Europe, this book is the ultimate analysis of it. The message: it’s not immigrants, it’s class! A model of the new cultural political economy.’ (Don Kalb, Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen)
‘This book will set the agenda for the study of right-wing populism, an essential reading for those wishing to understand this phenomenon in Central Europe and indeed the world.’ (Lawrence P. King, Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts Amherst)
‘Scheiring rehabilitates the concept of class in the post-socialist context and develops his fascinating analysis on three pillars – class, state, dependency – interpreted in a novel way.’ (András Bozóki, Professor of Political Science, Central European University)
Journal - EN by Gabor Scheiring
Methods: For this indirect demographic, retrospective cohort study, we collected multilevel data related to Hungary between 1995 and 2004 from the PrivMort database and other sources at the town, company, and individual level to assess the relation between the dominant company ownership of a town and mortality. We grouped towns into three ownership categories: dominant state, domestic private, and foreign ownership. We did population surveys in these towns to collect data on vital status and other characteristics of survey respondents' relatives. We assessed the relation between dominant ownership and mortality at the individual level. We used discrete-time survival modelling, adjusting for town-level and individual-level confounders, with clustered SEs.
Findings: Of 83 eligible towns identified, we randomly selected 52 for inclusion in the analysis and analysed ownership data from 262 companies within these towns. Additionally, between June 16, 2014, and Dec 22, 2014, we collected data on 78 622 individuals from the 52 towns, of whom 27 694 were considered eligible. After multivariable adjustment, we found that women living in towns with prolonged state ownership had significantly lower odds of dying than women living in towns dominated by domestic private ownership (odds ratio [OR] 0·74, 95% CI 0·61–0·90) or by foreign investment (OR 0·80, 0·69–0·92).
Interpretation: Prolonged state ownership was associated with protection of life chances during the post-socialist transformation for women. The indirect economic benefits of foreign investment do not translate automatically into better health without appropriate industrial and social policies.
Population-level data suggest that economic disruptions in the early 1990s increased working-age male mortality in post-Soviet countries. This study uses individual-level data, using an indirect estimation method, to test the hypothesis that fast privatisation increased mortality in Russia.
Methods
In this retrospective cohort study, we surveyed surviving relatives of individuals who lived through the post-communist transition to retrieve demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of their parents, siblings, and male partners. The survey was done within the framework of the European Research Council (ERC) project PrivMort (The Impact of Privatization on the Mortality Crisis in Eastern Europe). We surveyed relatives in 20 mono-industrial towns in the European part of Russia (ie, the landmass to the west of the Urals). We compared ten fast-privatised and ten slow-privatised towns selected using propensity score matching. In the selected towns, population surveys were done in which respondents provided information about vital status, sociodemographic and socioeconomic characteristics and health-related behaviours of their parents, two eldest siblings (if eligible), and first husbands or long-term partners. We calculated indirect age-standardised mortality rates in fast and slow privatised towns and then, in multivariate analyses, calculated Poisson proportional incidence rate ratios to estimate the effect of rapid privatisation on all-cause mortality risk.
Findings
Between November, 2014, and March, 2015, 21 494 households were identified in 20 towns. Overall, 13 932 valid interviews were done (with information collected for 38 339 relatives [21 634 men and 16 705 women]). Fast privatisation was strongly associated with higher working-age male mortality rates both between 1992 and 1998 (age-standardised mortality ratio in men aged 20–69 years in fast vs slow privatised towns: 1·13, SMR 0·83, 95% CI 0·77–0·88 vs 0·73, 0·69–0·77, respectively) and from 1999 to 2006 (1·15, 0·91, 0·86–0·97 vs 0·79, 0·75–0·84). After adjusting for age, marital status, material deprivation history, smoking, drinking and socioeconomic status, working-age men in fast-privatised towns experienced 13% higher mortality than in slow-privatised towns (95% CI 1–26).
Interpretation
The rapid pace of privatisation was a significant factor in the marked increase in working-age male mortality in post-Soviet Russia. By providing compelling evidence in support of the health benefits of a slower pace of privatisation, this study can assist policy makers in making informed decisions about the speed and scope of government interventions.
'Gabor Scheiring's book is a gift to all of us trying to understand a key puzzle of the 21st-century political-economy: how are regressive authoritarian regimes successfully constructed within formal democratic facades? Conceptually bold, theoretically nuanced, built on firm empirical foundations, the book is a model of how to research and theorize authoritarianism.' (Peter B. Evans, Professor Emeritus, Department of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley)
'This book is a tour de force, illuminating the internal hypocrisies of Hungary's post-2010 regime and the external complicities that have sustained it for the last decade.' (Chris Hann, Director, Max Planck Cambridge Centre for Ethics, Economy and Social Change, University of Cambridge)
‘If Hungary is the avant-garde case of illiberalism in Europe, this book is the ultimate analysis of it. The message: it’s not immigrants, it’s class! A model of the new cultural political economy.’ (Don Kalb, Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen)
‘This book will set the agenda for the study of right-wing populism, an essential reading for those wishing to understand this phenomenon in Central Europe and indeed the world.’ (Lawrence P. King, Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts Amherst)
‘Scheiring rehabilitates the concept of class in the post-socialist context and develops his fascinating analysis on three pillars – class, state, dependency – interpreted in a novel way.’ (András Bozóki, Professor of Political Science, Central European University)
Methods: For this indirect demographic, retrospective cohort study, we collected multilevel data related to Hungary between 1995 and 2004 from the PrivMort database and other sources at the town, company, and individual level to assess the relation between the dominant company ownership of a town and mortality. We grouped towns into three ownership categories: dominant state, domestic private, and foreign ownership. We did population surveys in these towns to collect data on vital status and other characteristics of survey respondents' relatives. We assessed the relation between dominant ownership and mortality at the individual level. We used discrete-time survival modelling, adjusting for town-level and individual-level confounders, with clustered SEs.
Findings: Of 83 eligible towns identified, we randomly selected 52 for inclusion in the analysis and analysed ownership data from 262 companies within these towns. Additionally, between June 16, 2014, and Dec 22, 2014, we collected data on 78 622 individuals from the 52 towns, of whom 27 694 were considered eligible. After multivariable adjustment, we found that women living in towns with prolonged state ownership had significantly lower odds of dying than women living in towns dominated by domestic private ownership (odds ratio [OR] 0·74, 95% CI 0·61–0·90) or by foreign investment (OR 0·80, 0·69–0·92).
Interpretation: Prolonged state ownership was associated with protection of life chances during the post-socialist transformation for women. The indirect economic benefits of foreign investment do not translate automatically into better health without appropriate industrial and social policies.
Population-level data suggest that economic disruptions in the early 1990s increased working-age male mortality in post-Soviet countries. This study uses individual-level data, using an indirect estimation method, to test the hypothesis that fast privatisation increased mortality in Russia.
Methods
In this retrospective cohort study, we surveyed surviving relatives of individuals who lived through the post-communist transition to retrieve demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of their parents, siblings, and male partners. The survey was done within the framework of the European Research Council (ERC) project PrivMort (The Impact of Privatization on the Mortality Crisis in Eastern Europe). We surveyed relatives in 20 mono-industrial towns in the European part of Russia (ie, the landmass to the west of the Urals). We compared ten fast-privatised and ten slow-privatised towns selected using propensity score matching. In the selected towns, population surveys were done in which respondents provided information about vital status, sociodemographic and socioeconomic characteristics and health-related behaviours of their parents, two eldest siblings (if eligible), and first husbands or long-term partners. We calculated indirect age-standardised mortality rates in fast and slow privatised towns and then, in multivariate analyses, calculated Poisson proportional incidence rate ratios to estimate the effect of rapid privatisation on all-cause mortality risk.
Findings
Between November, 2014, and March, 2015, 21 494 households were identified in 20 towns. Overall, 13 932 valid interviews were done (with information collected for 38 339 relatives [21 634 men and 16 705 women]). Fast privatisation was strongly associated with higher working-age male mortality rates both between 1992 and 1998 (age-standardised mortality ratio in men aged 20–69 years in fast vs slow privatised towns: 1·13, SMR 0·83, 95% CI 0·77–0·88 vs 0·73, 0·69–0·77, respectively) and from 1999 to 2006 (1·15, 0·91, 0·86–0·97 vs 0·79, 0·75–0·84). After adjusting for age, marital status, material deprivation history, smoking, drinking and socioeconomic status, working-age men in fast-privatised towns experienced 13% higher mortality than in slow-privatised towns (95% CI 1–26).
Interpretation
The rapid pace of privatisation was a significant factor in the marked increase in working-age male mortality in post-Soviet Russia. By providing compelling evidence in support of the health benefits of a slower pace of privatisation, this study can assist policy makers in making informed decisions about the speed and scope of government interventions.
A görög oikosz, melyből ökológia szavunk is származik, lakóházat, háztartást és lakókörnyezetet jelent. A polisz pedig az inkább kistérségre, mintsem a modern elszigetelt városra emlékeztető görög városállamot jelöli, melynek közös ügyeit intézi a politika. Az ökológiai válság nem egy tőlünk független környezet válsága, hanem közös otthonunk válsága. A kiút otthonunk közös ügyeinek intézésén, a politikán át vezet. A fenntarthatóság követelménye otthonos politikáért, ökológiai politikáért kiált. Kötetünk célja, hogy bevezetést adjon abba az elméleti irodalomba, mely az ökopolitika programját kívánja megalapozni.
feszítő igazságtalanságok elfogadhatatlan szintre emelkedtek, egyre gyengébbek a társadalmi szolidaritás szövetei. Mindezt tetézi, hogy a leszakadó társadalmi csoportok nem férnek hozzá a felemelkedésükhöz szükséges gazdasági erőforrásokhoz, de az emancipációjukhoz szükséges kulturális tartalmakhoz sem. Erre a megállapításra jutnak a tanulmányok szerzői, akik nem akarják elfogadni a mai helyzetet. Ők igazságosabb, szolidárisabb társadalmi-gazdasági rendszert és demokratikusabb politikai berendezkedést akarnak. Ettől az igénytől vezetve elemzik a tanulmányok az elmúlt negyedszázad társadalmi-politikai történéseit és struktúráit, irodalmi-esztétikai törekvéseit. Kötetünk jelzi: jelentkeztek olyan fiatalabb nemzedékhez tartozó tudósok, akik nem fogadják el sem a rendszerváltás utáni helyzetben kialakított közpolitikai megoldásokat mint alternatívanélkülieket, sem az eddigi utólagos olvasatokat mint egyedül lehetségeseket. Ez az új nemzedék – tetszik, nem tetszik – egyben látja az elmúlt negyedszázadot. Ez nem jelenti azt, hogy a szerzők általában egyenlőségjelet tennének az elmúlt időszakot uraló baloldali-liberális és jobboldali-neokonzervatív diskurzusok közé, de keresik és elemzik egymást feltételező létük társadalmi-gazdasági hátterét. A szerzők szakítanak az eddig jellemző gyakorlattal, amelyben a vita résztvevői önreflexió nélkül, csak a másik oldalt hibáztatják a bajokért, az áldatlan közállapotokért. Ennek az újításnak persze meglehet az ára: sértődés és elutasítás az érintettek részéről, de ezt az árat meg kell fizetnie annak, aki újat, mást akar. A kötet jelentős hányadát olyan tanulmányok alkotják, amelyek a többek által holtnak nyilvánított politikai gazdaságtan, illetve a szociológia eszköztárával elemzik a közelmúlt és a jelen politikai viszonyait. Ezekben a témakörökben olyan, korábban örökre letudottnak vett fogalmak és kategóriák segítik az elemzést, mint az osztály, az osztálystruktúra, kapitalizmus és részvételi demokrácia. Más elemzések megmutatják a folytonosságot a jövedelemelosztásban, a szociális és kisebbségpolitikában. A kötet szerzői azt üzenik: társadalmi szolidaritás nélkül nincs igazságosság, emancipáció nélkül nincs igazi szabadság. Közös, saját
értékvilágot tükröző identitás nélkül nincs saját lábán álló politikai mozgalom. A tanulmányokból az a következtetés adódik, hogy a nemzeti együttműködés rendszerét fel kell hogy váltsa az európai együttműködésben részt vállaló Magyar Köztársaság társadalmi-gazdasági szolidaritásnak formát adó demokráciája. Ennek az új köztársaságnak tagadnia kell az illiberális berendezkedést, de nem lehet puszta folytatása a 2010 előtti liberális alkotmányos demokráciának. A korábbi modernizációs konszenzus helyébe az igazságosabb társadalom vízióját
célszerű állítani, a zárt nemzetfelfogást a nyitott, befogadó nemzetfelfogással érdemes felváltani. A Politikatörténeti Alapítvány ösztöndíjasainak részvételével és támogatásával megszerveződött a Politikatörténeti Intézet Társadalomelméleti Műhelye. Ez a kötet – amely a 2015. november 26-án megrendezésre került A mai magyar valóság az elmúlt negyed század tükrében című konferencián elhangzott előadások írásos változatait tartalmazza – az első terméke az itt folyó tudományos, elméleti munkának. Az intézet, a műhely annak a tudatában tevékenykedik, hogy új gondolatok nélkül nincs új stratégia, a baloldaliság megújítása nélkül nincs baloldali megújulás.
2016. március
Földes György és Antal Attila
zésre épül. Leíró és összehasonlító makrogazdasági, illetve makrotársadalmi statisztikák, valamint két esettanulmány bemutatásával a cikk a magyar fejlődési modell két olyan jelenségét elemzi, melyek a demokrácia hanyatlásához vezettek: (1) a türelem politikájának kimerülése és a baloldal szavazóinak ebből következő kiábrándultsága és (2) a gazdasági elit polarizációja, ami a hazai kapi-
talista osztályt arra sarkallta, hogy a tőkefelhalmozás felpörgetéséért és védelem biztosításáért központi beavatkozást próbáljon kiharcolni. A választók rendszerváltásból való kiábrándulása nem okozta, hanem csak lehetővé tette, hogy a 2010 utáni kormány a nemzeti tőkésekkel részben együttműködve részben passzív beleegyezésével lebontsa a liberális demokrácia intézményeit, és saját érdekei alapján módosítsa a függő kapitalizmus szerkezeti elemeit. A magyar fejlődési modell kifulladásának megértése nélkül tehát nem érthetjük meg a magyar illiberalizmus felemelkedését és stabilitását.
a szociológiában, antropológiában az elmúlt évtizedekben elért fejlődésre építve új fogalmi eszköztárral dolgozik.
got out of control, has become dominant worldwide: has got globalised. It is drifting above us like an unquestionable ideology, only few are searching after its reason or its purpose. Most politicians and businessmen say, this trend, the inevitable trend of neoliberal globalisation serves all. Whereas the author seeks to show in his paper, that applying neoliberal policies raises serious problems around the
world, serving only few, meanwhile most of the people and living beings are losers of it. The final conclusion of the paper is that the problems drawn up are not new, neoliberal globalisation is only escalating and extending them worldwide, amplifying the deficits of the current form of capitalism.