Eric Hanley

The State, International Agencies, and Property Transformation in Postcommunist Hungary1

This article challenges evolutionary accounts of property transformation in postcommunist Hungary, which hold that novel property forms based on interenterprise ownership have emerged in that country. It shows that private property has emerged as the predominant category of ownership in Hungary and explains the rapid diffusion of private ownership by focusing on the actions of the state and international agencies such as the International Monetary Fund and the European Union. Following the collapse of communism, state actors in Hungary promoted the domestic accumulation of capital by subsidizing the sale of state enterprises to private parties, particularly enterprise insiders. Pressures from international agencies ultimately forced government officials to abandon this policy, however, and to conform to a neoliberal model of the state that allowed direct foreign investment. The conclusion considers the capacity of states to intervene in economic processes in an environment increasingly dominated by suprastate agencies.

Self-employment in post-communist Eastern Europe: a refuge from poverty or road to riches?

Abstract Researchers analyzing self-employment in post-communist Eastern Europe have frequently adopted a “dualist” model which relegates the self-employed to marginal sectors of the economy. This paper challenges the dualist approach and argues that the self-employed cannot be regarded as refugees from poverty with few resources and few opportunities to earn high incomes and accumulate wealth. Data from the Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovakia are used to show that self-employment in post-communist Eastern Europe encompasses two distinct class locations: the individually self-employed on the one hand, whose socioeconomic status differs little from that of ordinary workers, and employers on the other, who receive incomes and possess assets far in excess of that of both the individually self-employed and ordinary workers. A proper understanding of the manner in which systems of stratification have changed in Eastern Europe thus requires that one acknowledge processes of differentiation among the self-employed as well as the importance of property ownership in generating new forms of social inequality in the post-communist period.

Economic linkages to changing landscapes.

Many economic processes are intertwined with landscape change. A large number of individual economic decisions shape the landscape, and in turn the changes in the landscape shape economic decisions. This article describes key research questions about the economics of landscape change and reviews the state of research knowledge. The rich and varied economic–landscape interactions are an active area of research by economists, geographers, and others. Because the interactions are numerous and complex, disentangling the causal relationships in any given landscape system is a formidable research challenge. Limited data with mismatched temporal and spatial scales present further obstacles. Nevertheless, the growing body of economic research on these topics is advancing and shares fundamental challenges, as well as data and methods, with work in other disciplines.

Recruitment into the Eastern European Communist Elite: Dual Career Paths

Using data from Szelenyi and Treiman’s 1993 six-nation survey of Social Stratification in Eastern Europe, we replicate and extend Walder, Li, and Treiman’s (2000) paper showing different paths into the Chinese urban elite for professionals and cadres. For each of six formerly communist nations (Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Russia, and Slovakia), we find effects quite similar to those shown by Walder, Li, and Treiman for China: education is a more important determinant of recruitment to professional positions than to cadre positions and communist party membership is a more important determinant of recruitment to cadre than to professional positions. Unlike patterns of elite recruitment in China, however, we find virtually no detectable differences in patterns of elite recruitment over time, contrary to the conventional wisdom of students of Eastern European communism.

The Anger Games: Who Voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 Election, and Why?:

Recently released data from the 2016 American National Election Study allow us to offer a multifaceted profile of white voters who voted for Donald J. Trump in the 2016 presidential election. We find that Trump’s supporters voted for him mainly because they share his prejudices, not because they’re financially stressed. It’s true, as exit polls showed, that voters without four-year college degrees were likelier than average to support Trump. But millions of these voters—who are often stereotyped as “the white working class”—opposed Trump because they oppose his prejudices. These prejudices, meanwhile, have a definite structure, which we argue should be called authoritarian: negatively, they target minorities and women; and positively, they favor domineering and intolerant leaders who are uninhibited about their biases. Multivariate logistic regression shows that, once we take these biases into account, demographic factors (age, education, etc.) lose their explanatory power. The electorate, in short, is deeply divided. Nearly 75% of Trump supporters count themselves among his enthusiastic supporters, and even “mild” Trump voters are much closer in their attitudes to Trump’s enthusiasts than they are to non-Trump voters. Polarization is profound, and may be growing.

Two Steps Forward or Two Steps Back? Institutional Change in Post-Soviet Russia

Much of the research on the socioeconomic transformations that shook Russia in the 1990s has focused on two interrelated themes: the path-dependent nature of insti tutional change and the nature of the post socialist stratification order. Each of the books reviewed here advances the discussion of these two topics, albeit from different angles. In my comments I suggest several ways to improve the level of debate about institutional change and distributional out comes in contemporary Russia, including the need for more detailed attention to eco nomic transactions among firms and house holds in order to balance path-dependencies with an appreciation for the manner in which markets are shaping incentives and thereby generating social change. How Russia Really Works is based on inter views the author conducted between 1997 and 2003 with 50 informants, including busi nesspeople, journalists, law enforcement offi cials, accountants, and legal experts. In the book, Ledeneva shows how defects in the formal structure of Russian society have forced individuals and organizations to rely on informal practices, many of which date back to the Soviet period, to achieve their goals. The author devotes separate chapters to six informal practices in particular: chernyi piar (the release of negative information about candidates for political office), kompro mat (the gathering of compromising infor mation on politicians and businessmen for purposes of blackmail), krugovaia poruka (the mutual cover-up of illicit activities within elite circles), tenevoi barter (reliance barter chains, surrogate financial instruments, and other non-market mechanisms of exchange), dvoinaia bukhgalteriia (double accounting and other financial schemes which allow entre preneurs to avoid taxes and export capital abroad), and, last but not least, tolkachi (the Owning Russia: The Struggle over Factories, Farms, and Power, by Andrew Barnes. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. 273pp.

Left Turn in Postcommunist Politics: Bringing Class Back in?

35.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780801444340.