Gábor Scheiring

Social reproduction scholars have made headway in integrating the analysis of capitalism, class, gender, and care. We offer two contributions to this literature. First, we provide a novel framework with insights into companies as sites of decommodification, shaping childcare cost distribution and affecting childbearing rates. Second, we extend social reproduction research geographically to the oft-overlooked region of Eastern Europe. Eastern Europe is home to 15 of the world’s 20 fastest-declining populations, with low fertility as a prime cause. We argue that privatization catalyzes commodification, raising work intensity and financial-temporal uncertainty and eroding collective resources for social reproduction, thereby impacting childbearing. We explore this mechanism quantitatively by employing four distinct definitions of privatization across two datasets: one covering 52 Hungarian towns (1989–2006) and another spanning 29 postsocialist countries (1989–2012). We shed light on the details of the mechanism through a qualitative analysis of 82 life-history interviews in four Hungarian towns, surveying the lived experience of privatization.

In this study, we extend the research on anti-immigrant attitudes by analyzing an overlooked factor: health. We develop a framework explaining why residents perceive competition for health services with immigrants. Using data from eleven rounds of the European Social Survey, covering 222,989 respondents in 30 European countries (2002–2023), we find a consistent association between poor health and anti-immigration attitudes. Three pathways—the belief that immigrants drain public services, diminished interpersonal trust, and distrust in political institutions—mediate this effect. The association holds across four measures of ill health, with propensity score matching to reduce selection bias and extensive robustness tests. We conclude that health is crucial for attitudes about immigration not only because of welfare chauvinism and resource competition but also because bad health makes people lose faith in each other and the system, intensifying their fear of losing access to vital health services, translating into hostility toward immigrants.

The literature on populism is divided on whether economic factors are significant and robust causes of populism. To clarify this, we performed the first systematic review and meta-analysis of the evidence of a causal association between economic insecurity and populism. We combined database searches with searching the citations of eligible studies and recently published reviews. We identified and reviewed thirty-six studies and presented a concise narrative summary and numerical synthesis of the key findings. Although we found significant heterogeneity in several dimensions, all studies reported a significant causal association. A recurrent magnitude was that economic insecurity explained around one-third of recent surges in populism. We tested for publication bias by conducting a funnel-plot asymmetry test and a density discontinuity test of the distribution of t -statistics. We found significant evidence of publication bias; however, the causal association between economic insecurity and populism remains significant after controlling for it.

This book forum discusses Ivan Kalmar´s pivotal book on the position of “Central Europe” in the racialized hierarchies of “West”/“Europe” and their not-quite-white Others. The authors debate the main contributions and potential blind spots of the book and its key concepts. The concepts of racism and whiteness answer the not-so-new question on Central Europe and Europe's “East” anew: How come that the populations of and in this diverse region happen to repeatedly find themselves in the very same marginal position in European historical orders? This question has very contemporary manifestations; Europe's persistent East-West socio-economic and socio-cultural hierarchies, among others, co-produce the local populations' marginalized or marginalizing positioning vis-à-vis each other and the rest of Europe or the world. In this honest discussion, the authors chart new intellectual pathways for utilizing racism and whiteness to help us better understand this question and its many manifestations from within and outside the region.

An unprecedented mortality crisis struck Eastern Europe during the 1990s, causing around seven million excess deaths. We enter the debate about the causes of this crisis by performing the first quantitative analysis of the association between deindustrialisation and mortality in Eastern Europe. We develop a theoretical framework identifying deindustrialisation as a process of social disintegration rooted in the lived experience of shock therapy. We test this theory relying on a novel multilevel dataset, fitting survival and panel models covering 52 towns and 42,800 people in 1989–95 in Hungary and 514 towns in European Russia in 1991–99. The results show that deindustrialisation was directly associated with male mortality and indirectly mediated by hazardous drinking as a stress-coping strategy. The association is not a spurious result of a legacy of dysfunctional working-class health culture aggravated by low alcohol prices during the early years of the transition. Both countries experienced deindustrialisation, but social and economic policies have offset Hungary’s more immense industrial employment loss. The results are relevant to health crises in other regions, including the deaths of despair plaguing the American Rust Belt. Policies addressing the underlying causes of stress and despair are vital to save lives during painful economic transformations.

In contrast to often peripheral Western European populist radical right (PRR) parties, Fidesz has held a supermajority in the Hungarian parliament since 2010 and has therefore been in a unique position to formulate and implement policy, constrained chiefly by the preferences of its broad electorate and past campaign promises. This chapter analyses Fidesz’s health policy measures since 2010. It finds that Fidesz has employed a mix of policy approaches in health care, including statist, liberal chauvinistic and clientelistic reforms. Fidesz’s direct impact on health care is mixed: its smoking ban has been praised by international observers, whereas the continued underfunding of the health system has done little to improve care and population health outcomes. By undermining the welfare state with a shift to ‘workfare society’, the party has arguably had a clearer indirect impact on health, adversely affecting population health by increasing social insecurity and income and wealth inequality. Unlike its Western European populist radical right counterparts who tend to adopt clearer welfare chauvinistic or liberal chauvinistic approaches to health and social policy, Fidesz’s healthcare reforms do not fit into any current single concept of welfare state change.

Deindustrialization is a major burden on workers’ health in many countries, calling for theoretically informed sociological analysis. Here, we present a novel neoclassical sociological synthesis of the lived experience of deindustrialization. We conceptualize industry as a social institution whose disintegration has widespread implications for the social fabric. Combining Durkheimian and Marxian categories, we show that deindustrialization generates ruptures in economic production, which entail job and income loss, increased exploitation, social inequality, and the disruption of services. These ruptures spill over to the field of social reproduction, generating material deprivation, job strain, fatalism, increased domestic workload, anomie, community disintegration, and alienation. These ruptures in social reproduction are sources of psychosocial stress, through which deindustrialization gets embodied as ill health and dysfunctional health behavior. We substantiate this framework through the extensive qualitative thematic analysis of 82 life history interviews in Hungary’s rust belt.