Zoltán Ádám, PhD
Senior Research Fellow
HUN-REN Centre for Social Sciences, Budapest
from September 2025 to February 2026
Born in 1971 in Balassagyarmat, Hungary
BSc in Business Administration, College of Finance and Accountancy, Salgótarján; MA in Southeast-European Studies, Central European University; MA in Sociology, Eötvös Loránd University; MPhil in Political Science, Central European University; Mid-Career Master in Public Administration, Harvard University; PhD in Economics, University of Debrecen
Arbeitsvorhaben
Hungary under Orbán: The EU’s Only Electoral Autocracy in Comparative Perspective
Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz gained a two-thirds constitutional majority in the 2010 parliamentary elections, and Hungary subsequently entered a period of accelerating autocratization. My ambition for my stay at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin is to complete a book on this process: its underlying reasons, enabling factors, most important elements, and consequences. For this process, paradoxically, made Hungary as important on the global stage as it has not been since the revolution of 1956.In this spectacular process of autocratization, the governing parliamentary majority gradually gained power over the judiciary and all other formally independent agencies and public institutions—among others, the office of the chief prosecutor, the state accounting office, the public television and radio, and the public news agency. As the number of independent agencies shrank, public space was increasingly filled with government propaganda, often in the form of hate speech against government-designated scapegoats, including migrants and refugees, civil society organizations, the EU, the IMF, the UN, and George Soros. In 2019, in consequence, Hungary was classified as partly free by Freedom House (FH), which was the first time an EU member state was ever given this classification. Similarly, since 2020, the V-Dem Institute has classified Hungary an electoral autocracy, again for the first time for any EU member state. Nevertheless, the roots of the dramatic post-2010 Hungarian democratic decline should be sought in the pre-2010 period. Why, how, and with which specific consequences are the subject of my book.
Recommended Reading
Ádám, Zoltán (2019). “Explaining Orbán: A Political Transaction Cost Theory of Authoritarian Populism.” Problems of Post-Communism 66 (6): 385–401. https://doi.org/10.1080/10758216.2019.1643249.
— (2020). “Re-feudalizing Democracy: An Approach to Authoritarian Populism Taken from Institutional Economics.” Journal of Institutional Economics 16 (1): 105–118. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1744137419000304.
— (2023). “Economic Versus Authoritarian: Economic and Social Policies of Alternating Populisms in Pre- and Post-2010 Hungary.” In Encyclopedia of New Populism and Responses in the 21st Century, edited by Joseph Chacko Chennattuserry, Madhumati Deshpande, and Paul Hong. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9859-0_11-1.
Publikationen aus der Fellowbibliothek
Ádám, Zoltán (Cambridge, 2020)
Re-feudalizing democracy : an approach to authoritarian populism taken from institutional economics
Ádám, Zoltán (Abingdon, Oxon, 2019)
Explaining Orbán : a political transaction cost theory of authoritarian populism