The Political Ecoomy of Illiberalism in Hungary

From Trump in the US, trough Brexit in the UK, to illiberalism in Hungary or Poland liberal ideas and liberal institutions are tumbling. The sweeping U-turn of Hungary from a consolidated democracy to a hybrid illiberal regime is particularly perplexing. Existing research agendas, the actor oriented transition theory with its focus on demagogue politicians, the institutionalist scholarship with its focus on good constitutions, as well as the varieties of capitalism approach highlighting the beneficial role of FDI in the CEE region failed to foresee and explain the rise of illiberalism. In my paper I intend to reorient the scholarship on democratisation to focus on how the particular policies that facilitated the international integration of Hungary affected the chance of reaching democratic consolidation. I propose a relational class theory of illiberalism that sheds light on how the dependent integration model of Hungary led to the structural disarticulation of the economy and to the exhaustion of the central legitimation mechanisms of the liberal state. Using a mixed-method strategy, including the content analysis of elite biographies, analysis of secondary data as well as three case studies the paper provides an empirically substantiated causal narrative about the interaction of structure and agency in the rise of illiberalism in Hungary. The conceptual framework developed in the paper has the potential to be applied and tested in comparative settings in the future.