Mobilizing Rural Support: Targeted Government Spending and Democratic Backsliding in Hungary, Politics and Governance 2025, vol 13 -- with Ádám Reiff
The Ukrainian Refugee Crisis and the Politics of Public Opinion: Evidence from Hungary, Perspectives on Politics. 2024, 1-26 -- with Thomas B. Pepinsky and Ádám Reiff
Társadalmi törésvonalak és gazdasági (ir)racionalitások. A közgazdaságtan szerepe és helye a populizmus kutatásában Közgazdasági Szemle, LXX. ÉVF., 2023 -- with István Benczes
An Economic Understanding of Populism: A Conceptual Framework of the Demand and the Supply Side of Populism, Political Studies Review, 2022: 1-17. -- with István Benczes
While the cat’s away the mice will play? The politics of aid in East Central Europe In: Aid Power and Politics, Routledge, 2019 -- with Balázs Szent-Iványi, András Tétényi
Scholars of competitive authoritarian elections have examined the strategies that politicians use to pursue reelection, but there is limited literature on the role of economic policy in shaping incumbent support. Focusing on Hungary, one of the most prominent cases of democratic backsliding in the contemporary era, we analyze how two large-scale fiscal policies —a pension bonus and a family tax refund—influenced voter preferences in the country’s April 2022 parliamentary elections. We find no evidence that these subsidies targeted groups that already supported the government; instead, we find that the main effect of the transfers was to demobilize voters who might have opposed the incumbent party. Our findings also indicate that most voters consider it inappropriate to support a political party solely based on these transfers. Using sensitive question techniques, we estimate that 20% of incumbent voters’ choices were influenced by the 2022 subsidies, but mostly by reinforcing their preferences rather than changing their vote choice..
When Do Voters Punish Corrupt Candidates? Evidence from Hungary
with Ádám Reiff, Joost van Spanje
Why do voters often tolerate corruption? While democratic theory suggests that competitive elections should allow voters to remove corrupt officeholders, empirical findings remain mixed. This paper contributes to this debate by proposing and applying a comprehensive framework that captures the three key stages of the corruption voting process: information acquisition, mitigating conditions, and behavioral response. We examine these dynamics in Hungary, widely viewed as the most corrupt member state of the European Union – a context where public concern about corruption is high, but political consequences are limited. Drawing on original survey data and a conjoint experiment conducted during the 2024 local and European Parliamentary elections, we assess how Hungarian voters respond to information about candidate corruption under varying conditions. At the first stage – information acquisition – we find that the credibility of the information source significantly shapes responses to corruption, especially among core partisan voters. At the second stage – mitigating conditions – partisanship emerges as a key factor in tolerance of corruption, alongside context-specific justifications such as perceived economic benefit (e.g., job creation) and broader economic circumstances. At the third stage – behavioral response – we show that corruption linked to in-party candidates reduces support primarily through abstention rather than vote switching when no clean alternative is available. Even when a clean candidate is present, many voters remain loyal to their preferred party, underscoring the strength of partisan attachment. By systematically engaging with all three stages of the corruption voting process, this study offers a nuanced understanding of when and why voters sanction – or fail to sanction – corrupt politicians.
New Parties and Their Media Coverage: An Experimental Study of Media Practitioners in Italy
with Ádám Reiff, Joost van Spanje and Alessio Scopelliti
Studies on news values have provided many insights into which party messages get reported in the media. Nonetheless, less attention has been paid on whether and when new party’s messages are reported. In this study, we use the concept of news values to examine how journalists from four Italian regions perceive the newsworthiness of party messages. Using conjoint survey experiment, fictional party press releases are used to test for the influence of five important news values and how the importance of these news values differ across new and established parties. Very preliminary findings suggest that the newsworthiness of a press release issued by a new party significantly differs from those issued by an established party.
This paper investigates how exposure to different types of conflict affects health outcome for individual in general and for women and children in particular. Over the period 2003 – 2018, health outcomes of individuals from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) database are matched with conflict events from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Database (ACLED) within a 241 km (150 miles) radius that occurred 120 days before the date of DHS interview. The study examine the short-term effect of conflict on various health outcomes (on height for age z-scores, weight-for-age z-scores and weight-for-age z-scores) in 33 sub-Saharan African countries. The main goal of the study is to understand (1) how conflict affects health outcome for women and children in Sub-Saharan Africa; (2) whether household members are affected differently within the household; (3) through what mechanisms these effects are operating.
How do citizens form perceptions of a complex and abstract economy and how is perception of the economy translated into vote choice? Recent studies of economic voting have focused on the role of the local economy, but with inconclusive results. A large literature finds that the local economic milieu has a substantial effect on incumbent support – incumbent politicians are rewarded for strong local economic performance and punished for weak performance. There are, however, reasons to expect that individuals’ economic perceptions are endogenous to vote choice, meaning that existing cross-sectional models cannot provide a valid test of the causal local economic voting claim. In this study, we use a novel dataset and link a nationally-representative election survey with more than 75,500 respondents to extraordinary granular local economic administrative data measured without sampling error. Using an instrumental variable approach, we assess the effect of sociotropic evaluations on the decision to vote for the incumbent government in Hungary by exploiting variations in objective local economic measures. Findings show that changes in unemployment rate as well as changes in income level have strong predictive power on individuals’ sociotropic evaluations with changes in income having slightly stronger effect; while the effect of sociotropic evaluations on party preferences are stronger during the peak of the Great Recession. The study thus provides a framework for understanding when citizens respond politically to the local economy.