Economic Versus Authoritarian: Economic and Social Policies of Alternating Populisms in Pre- and Post-2010 Hungary

Populism as a form of governance has played fundamentally important roles in post-WWII global history. Following Federico Finchelstein’s work, populism in this entry is understood as “a form of authoritarian democracy for the post-war world,” in which the intrinsic contradictions of democracy could be addressed in economically and institutionally underdeveloped, relatively backward – yet democratic – societies. Hence, populism is conceptualized as political practice, instead of an ideology or a communication style. As a practice of governance, economic policies have dramatic distributional consequences that may reinforce social support or rejection for populist governments and may determine the viability of populist political regimes. In the particular Hungarian case, whereas both pre- and post-2010 Hungarian political regimes could be considered populist in important ways, their social and economic policies differed dramatically. The entry focuses on their comparison through which the concepts of economic and authoritarian populisms are presented.