Dynamics of an Authoritarian System : Hungary, 2010–2021

This conceptually synthetic and empirically rich book demonstrates the vulnerability of democratic settings to authoritarianism and populism.Six scholars from various professional fields explore here the metamorphosis of a political party into a centralized authoritarian system.Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party needed less than ten years to accomplish this transformation in Hungary.In 2010, after winning a majority that could make changes in the constitution – two-thirds of the parliamentary seats, they evolved and stabilized the system, which produced again the two-thirds majority in 2014 and 2018. The authors reveal how a democratic setting can be used as a device for political capture.They show how a political entity managed to penetrate almost all sub-fields of the economy to arrive at institutionalized corruption, and how the centralized power structure reproduces itself.With the help of a powerful empirical apparatus—among others analyses of more than 220,000 public tenders, redistributions of state subsidies, and the interconnectedness of those privileged with the political elite — the authors detail the functioning of a crony system and the network aspects of political connections in the rapid enrichment of politically-linked businesses.Their studies demonstrate the role of political capture in this redistribution and how this capture leads to a new social stratification.