National-neoliberal fiscal populism

New Political Economy, 2019

This paper analyses the economic dimension of populist governance in post-crisis Europe by exploring whether and in what ways populist economic policies diverge from neoliberal orthodoxy. Existing literature on contemporary populism in Central and Eastern Europe is ambivalent on this question and lacks systematic analyses of populist economic policies while in government. The comparative analysis of the Fidesz-led government in Hungary and the Law and Justice government in Poland is used to analyse the policy shifts in different domains. The main claim is that a combination of both domestic ideological change at the level of government and transnationally conditioned structural factors need to be considered to explain the shift towards and the variation in the pursuit of a ‘heterodox’ economic strategy under the two populist governments. The paper concludes by offering a reflection on why the analysed policy changes do not correspond with a more decisive shift towards an alternative trajectory of capitalist development in post-crisis Europe.

Socio-Economic Review

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.

2024

Populism is principally a political phenomenon; yet, the economic implications of populist rule can be substantial, as underlined by the Polish and Hungarian cases. By operationalizing the ideational definition of populism, the article sheds light on the economic consequences of populist governance in three major domains: (1) macroeconomic management, (2) welfare policies, and (3) market regulation. The article demonstrates that while-at least until the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic-Hungary and Poland refrained from engaging in irresponsible macroeconomic policies such as the accumulation of public debt or external debt (typical signs of classical "economic populism"), the governments of the two countries embarked on widescale income and wealth redistribution in their respective economies. Nevertheless, these populist governments targeted different groups of people in their redistributive policies: Hungary adopted a largely selective and exclusive social policy targeting the middle class and the well off, while Poland endorsed a more inclusive strategy that benefited the poor as well. Furthermore, the two countries deliberately tilted the playing field toward their protégés: Hungary preferred the preservation of private property; whereas, Poland explicitly increased the share and role of state-owned enterprises in the economy.

Eastern Journal of European Studies, 2022

The aim of this paper is to analyze the revealed resistance to fiscal stability institutions recently showed by Romanian politicians. Establishing the context, the design of the present-day institutional environment for fiscal stability is investigated, with special attention being paid to its legal protection against political pressure. Typical opinions recently expressed by key political actors on certain issues related to fiscal stability are analyzed and categorized into a number of main arguments. To this end, insights from the political discourse analysis field are employed as tools for decoding the political meaning of written and spoken text. The public debates around the 2015-2016 tax cut program are presented as a case study for the investigation of political resistance to settled fiscal stability institutions.

Policy Research Working Paper Series, 2008

2018

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. Based on the theory of transaction cost economics, the paper argues that populism is a form of government that reduces political uncertainties inherently present in liberal democracies, and hence mitigates political transaction costs. At times of crises and a mismatch between formal and informal institutions conditioning political exchange, demand for such a restricted form of democracy rises. This is what happened in Hungary towards the end of the 2000s, in a period characterized by fiscal stabilization and the socially costly impact of the global financial crisis.

Europe-Asia Studies, 2021

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.

The Palgrave Handbook of Populism, 2022

Popular among economists, pundits and policymakers, the theory of economic populism is used to criticize expansionist policies purportedly enacted by fiscally irresponsible populist governments. Introduced by Jeffrey Sachs, Rüdiger Dornbusch and Sebastian Edwards in 1989, the theory maintains that such policies put into motion a cycle of economic devastation where populists register initial successes but soon face bottlenecks and other market failures that lead to hyperinflation and balance-of-payments problems, ending with regime change and the restoration of orthodox policies. On their part, political scientists have strongly resisted economically deterministic interpretations of populism, submitting adequate evidence that populist phenomena are not associated with particular economic policies. However, the popularity of economic populism remains intact. This article opens a new and expanded line of criticism by exposing the normative historical foundations of the theory of economic populism, while highlighting an array of conceptual, methodological and empirical flaws that render it unfit for scientific purposes. The insistence on its use despite obvious analytical shortcomings is explained as an artifact of economic populism’s ideologically weaponized nature.