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Re-feudalizing democracy: an approach to authoritarian populism taken from institutional economics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2019

Zoltán Ádám Open the ORCID record for Zoltán Ádám [Opens in a new window]
Zoltán Ádám*
Affiliation:
Corvinus University of Budapest, Department of Comparative and Institutional Economics, Budapest, Hungary.
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Abstract

Research on populism has gained importance in the light of the recent global populist surge. Political scientists have become concerned with the problem of authoritarian populism, examining how illiberal, anti-pluralist populist parties have degraded liberal democracies. Economic research on recent forms of populism, although also growing, lack a comprehensive conceptual approach. This paper reduces this gap by conceptualizing authoritarian populism in terms of political transaction costs, arguing that its primary function is to vertically integrate political exchange under conditions of general franchise. If successful, authoritarian populist regimes internalize a large share of political transaction costs inherent in decentralized democratic political exchange. This entails a degraded version of democracy, eliminating a significant part of substantial electoral choice. Through weakening impersonal collective political contracting, authoritarian populists bring back private political contracting as a dominant political coordination mechanism, effectively re-feudalizing democracy.

Keywords

Authoritarian populismautocracypolitical contractingpolitical exchangepolitical transaction costs
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Institutional Economics , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , February 2020 , pp. 105 - 118
Copyright
Copyright © Millennium Economics Ltd 2019 

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Footnotes

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the departmental seminar of Central European University's Department of Political Science (Budapest) in 2017 and at the Kornai'90 conference at Corvinus University of Budapest in 2018. Comments by seminar and conference participants, especially by András Bozóki, Zsolt Enyedi, Geoffrey Hodgson and Andrea Szalavetz, are gratefully acknowledged. Anikó Bakonyi, Rogers Brubaker, György Petőcz, András Simonovits and the anonymous reviewers also provided a useful critique, and helped improve the text.

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