Gabor Scheiring

Many thanks to the @sudosteuropa.bsky.social for organizing. The event is hybrid, register here to join in Regensburg or online: sogde.org/de/events/symposion-2026/ 6/6

What makes this theoretically striking is the asymmetry: Orbán, head of a country of 10 million, functions as the active builder of these networks, while his American and European counterparts largely play the role of recipients. A case study on small-state counter-hegemonic foreign policy. 5/6

The core argument: this is not just rhetorical affinity between illiberal leaders. Orbán has systematically invested public resources in building durable transnational infrastructure designed to outlast electoral cycles and reshape political common sense on both sides of the Atlantic. 4/6

My intervention is about the transatlantic dimension, the infrastructural foundations of the Trump-Orbán bromance. It draws on a new study mapping the dense institutional web connecting Hungarian state-funded foundations, think tanks, and media platforms to American conservative networks. 3/6

Transnational illiberal counter-hegemony is reshaping politics in Europe and the US, with Orban's Hungary acting as a key node. Together, we will examine Hungary's expanding influence in the US, the Western Balkans and Europe through institutions, media, and communication infrastructures. 2/6

This Friday, I'll be speaking at the symposium "Make Illiberalism Great Again" in Regensburg, exploring how a small state punches far above its weight globally. Organized by @sonjapriebus.bsky.social & @sudosteuropa.bsky.social, I'm glad to join @veghzsuzsanna.bsky.social and Ivana Ranković. 1/6

Join us next week for a symposium on how the Hungarian government has been actively seeking to transnationalize its political project and position itself as a reference point for like-minded forces in Europe and beyond.

Registration to participate in Regensburg or online: sogde.org/de/events/sy...

Welcome, new followers! And a particular groetjes to the Dutch wave; not entirely sure how I landed in your corner of Bluesky, but I'm glad to see the engagement. I write about political economy, illiberalism, the lived experiences of economic shocks, and how to save democracy from the polycrisis.

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A lot changed in my life during those eight years. Six cities, five countries, three continents, multiple precarious contracts, major political upheavals. There was one constant: this paper was almost always under review somewhere. Not anymore. Enjoy reading; comments welcome! 10/10

A peek behind the scenes: this paper took around _eight_ years from first idea to publication. It survived multiple submissions, a second-round rejection after inivitation to revise at AJS, and several R&Rs that would have required hollowing out the core argument. We chose not to. 9/10

I’m grateful to my co-authors Lawrence King, Eva Fodor, Raymond Caraher, and Gøsta Esping-Andersen. Co-authoring with Gøsta, a doyen of welfare state theory and social demography, was quite an experience and a real intellectual education. 8/10

Marketization does not just reshape jobs and incomes. It reaches into intimate life decisions by transforming the conditions of social reproduction, including care, time, security, and collective resources people rely on when deciding whether to have children. 7/10

Empirically, we combine cross-national panel models with subnational and qualitative evidence. The mechanism we trace is straightforward: privatization and commodification shift risk downward, reorganize household budgets and time, and make childbearing a far more uncertain project. 6/10

We argue that these are not side questions but core to understanding the postsocialist fertility decline. This is not a minor story. Around 15 of the world’s 20 fastest-shrinking populations are in Eastern Europe, with low fertility as a major driver. 5/10

Economic production and social reproduction are two sides of the same coin. Social reproduction theory asks a simple question: if workers produce value, who produces workers? And how are the costs of sustaining life distributed across households, markets, and the state? 4/10

That dialogue was always going to be a tall order, especially with a genuinely mixed-method design. But that tension between theory and demography, political economy and fertility research, is exactly what motivated the project in the first place. 3/10

I have friends who do brilliant work on social reproduction, take Marx seriously, but don’t find demography inspiring. I also have demographer friends who do brilliant work on fertility but don’t take Marx very seriously. This paper tries to put these worlds in dialogue. 2/10

I have a new, open-access paper out in the European Journal of Sociology: “Commodification and Social Reproduction: Theory and Mixed-Method Evidence on the Effect of Privatization on Childbearing.” After a long journey, it’s finally published online. 1/10

👉 doi.org/10.1017/S000...

An interview with me about why liberal #democracies keep producing their own gravediggers is now out on @mediapart.fr, France's leading independent investigative outlet. #Illiberalism is a political reaction to the crisis of liberal #globalism. Details in French: blogs.mediapart.fr/edition/chro...

How steep is Trump’s democratic backsliding? The erosion of established norms has been dramatic but institutions are holding up

www.ft.com/content/b474...

Only power restrains power. This is especially true for democracy, a fragile compromise of competing social forces. A friend, former fellow Member of the Hungarian Parliament Benedek Javor and I explore these dynamics in our book on illiberalism that we are busy finishing these days. 7/7

Societies can and do fight back, in the West, like the brave anti-ICE organizing in the US; in the South, like in Brazil where people voted Bolsonaro out and then jailed him; and in the East, such as in South Korea, where courts and citizens together fended off a coup. 6/7

But this is no cause for complacency. The US is one year in. Turkey and Hungary took over a decade to reach competitive authoritarianism. Institutions without social legitimacy are inherently fragile. They don't protect themselves.They require sustained and organized confrontation across levels. 5/7

There's a silver lining too. US institutions have proven more resistant to capture. American institutions are inherently superior. But US politics has more veto points. States, federal judges, local officials, and organized social pressure can slow down autocratization. 4/7

The literature is littered with claims about the Global East's and South's "cultural deficits." This civilizational conceit was never analytically sound. Time to reckon with the intrinsic contradictions of liberal globalism. The problem is not moral corruption but systemic legitimacy deficit. 3/7

The figures challenge the orientalizing framework that has dominated the populism discourse for decades. Analysts tend to treat illiberalism as an exotic pathology of the Eastern periphery, fascinating to observe, frightening to contemplate, but distant enough to remain someone else's problem. 2/7

The US under Trump's second term is experiencing the steepest democratic backsliding in contemporary history, outpacing Russia, Turkey, and Hungary. But there's hope, too. Burn-Murdoch is probably the best data journalist today. His latest @financialtimes.com analysis is essential reading. 1/7

“The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” This is the world bequeathed to us by a dysfunctional global elite facing the biggest polycrisis in humanity’s history. They don’t care. Like Zuckerberg, they’ve built their own Hawaiian fortresses to survive.

Happy New Year. 7/7

These “leaders of the free world” know very well that this is a win for global illiberalism and strongmen whose actions can be similarly justified by the ends of their choosing. 6/7