Democracy and welfare in hard times: The social policy of the Orbán Government in Hungary between 2010 and 2014

Szikra, Dorottya

doi:10.1177/0958928714545446

Cited by 168 publications

(112 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…This statement is made frequently in public debates -and always in a negative context. There is a corrupt redistribution in the welfare system because benefits and services do not aim the poor; the system is ill-targeted and at times even produces Matthew-effects: the well-to-do have better access to public resources than the needy (Ferge, 2000;Révész, 2002;Benedek, Firle and Scharle, 2006;Szikra, 2014). Our results support this observation but we also offer an alternative context to the analysis.…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 78%

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Gál¹,

Medgyesi²

2017

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There seems to be a general consent in the expert community that Hungarian social policy provides poorly targeted benefits and services that are prone to Mattheweffects. Our results confirm this observation but we also find that the data offer an alternative interpretation of what the Hungarian welfare state is actually doing. Instead of supporting the poor it reallocates resources from the working age population to children and elderly people. It functions as an intermediary between overlapping generations that seek to finance their lifecycle by exploiting the opportunity offered by the very overlap, the fact that contemporaries are of different age.In a cross-sectional framework we analyse reallocations by age and income simultaneously and assess the relative importance of these two variables in explaining the access and contribution to public benefits. Our data from 2010 (based on EU-SILC and the Household Budget Survey) covers public transfers (cash and in-kind) and both direct and indirect taxes. We compare the importance of age and income in explaining transfers and taxes in a regression-analysis framework by studying causal importance (comparing coefficients) and dispersion importance of the variables (using Shapley-value decomposition). We find that income is irrelevant in explaining access to benefits and services but age is important. On the contribution side, income proves as important as age. This qualifies our description of the Hungarian welfare system: it serves as a channel through which affluent people in their working age support people in inactive age of all income groups.

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Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 78%

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Gál¹,

Medgyesi²

2017

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“…After tentative beginnings under the socialist government in power until the spring of 2010, workfare schemes were expanded nationwide under the national-conservative government led by Viktor Orbán. During this period, swingeing cuts have been imposed on social expenditure, including unemployment benefits (Szikra, 2014). However, far from imposing neoliberal principles, the government has explicitly celebrated its illiberal paths in every domain.…”

Section: Hann C: Cucumbers and Courgettes: Rural Workfare And The Nmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…in assuaging the debts of households that had taken out mortgages in Swiss francs. See Szikra (2014) for further examples of deviations from neoliberal principles. 6 See Jakab, 2014 for an account of how an intellectual unable to find employment appropriate to his qualifications was obliged to join a poorly organised workfare scheme in Budapest in order to qualify for basic social benefits.…”

Section: Hann C: Cucumbers and Courgettes: Rural Workfare And The Nmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cucumbers and Courgettes: Rural Workfare and the New Double Movement in Hungary

Hann

2016

Intersections

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Intersections. EEJSP 2(2): 38-56. DOI: 10.17356/ieejsp.v2i2.180 http://intersections.tk.mta.hu AbstractThe paper is an application of the economic anthropology of Karl Polanyi to contemporary rural Hungary. After addressing the influence of Polanyi's critique of market society and his standing in the discipline of anthropology, the main focus is the community of Tázlár on the Danube-Tisza interfluve. The paper traces the history of the 'fictitious commodities' of land and labour in this relatively isolated settlement, which was not fully integrated into the national society until the socialist era. The innovative symbiosis of household and cooperative farming was destroyed in the 1990s. In the depressed economic climate of today, workfare schemes are popular because they treat villagers as human beings rather than as commodities to be exploited for maximum profit. The workfare initiatives of populist power holders can be interpreted as one facet of a complex 'double movement' in which postsocialist society seeks to defend itself against the domination of the market.

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“…Another particular feature of the Hungarian approach is its combination of neoliberal and etatist approaches 9 (Szikra 2014). It shares characteristics of neoliberal workfare policies in advanced capitalist countries (UK, USA, Germany, etc.)…”

Section: Changing Paradigms For Labour Market Interventionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Workfare Schemes as a Tool For Preventing the Further Impoverishment of the Rural Poor

Keller

Kovács

Rácz

et al. 2016

Eastern European Countryside

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This article examines workfare schemes in rural Hungary and their contribution to relieving rural poverty. It does so on the basis of an analysis of European Union statistics and a series of semi-structured interviews which were conducted in 2013-2015 as part of a larger project investigating the contemporary state of rural Hungary. The paper comprises four sections: following a short description of the methodology, regional disparities and deprivation in rural areas are introduced with the help of a typology on deprivation and Eurostat data, thus providing evidence for European comparison. Following this, the main findings of our extensive qualitative research into workfare policies in rural Hungary are Nigel Swain is a senior lecturer at the University of Liverpool, and is also a member of the project team.

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Democracy and welfare in hard times: The social policy of the Orbán Government in Hungary between 2010 and 2014

Cited by 168 publications

References 23 publications

Untitled

Untitled

Cucumbers and Courgettes: Rural Workfare and the New Double Movement in Hungary

Workfare Schemes as a Tool For Preventing the Further Impoverishment of the Rural Poor

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