Situations of Dependency, Mechanisms of Dependency Governance, and the Rise of Populism in Hungary and Poland

Abstract

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 developmental bottlenecks foster populist social coalitions. This paper builds on the dependency research program to demonstrate how the commonalities and differences in Poland’s and Hungary’s dependent integration into the global economy gave rise to two varieties of populism. While the two countries employed different industrial policies leading to different levels of domestic economic disintegration, they were more similar in the dimension of social policies before the populist breakthrough, giving rise to profound social disintegration in both countries. The disillusionment of the working class with the dependent liberal regime destabilized the social coalitions that were sustaining liberal democracy. The severe disintegration of the economy in Hungary also induced support for national-populism in the domestic business class, leading to a new compromise with transnational capital in the technological export sectors. Poland did not experience such economic disintegration; thus, the alliance between the domestic business class and national-populists is more ambivalent. Hungary’s populism redistributes significant resources upward, while Poland’s populism is more open to redistributive demands of the popular classes.