In a recently published article in the European Journal of Political Economy, CEU School of Public Policy Assistant Professor Michael T. Dorsch and co-author Paul Maarek, from the Université de Cergy-Pontoise, have laid out a new economic theory of political transitions.
“The inspiration for this research,” Dorsch says, “was the Arab Spring. When we thought about what was happening it became apparent that the standard economic theory of political transition, based on distributional grievances, was inconsistent with modern waves of democratic transitions, which we identified as based on institutional grievances. Management of the macro-economy is the key factor autocratic regimes are held accountable for in our political economic model of revolution and transition.”
“What causes people to take to the streets,” says Dorsch, “are institutional grievances over bad economic policy. Hungary is a democratic country, of course, but recent events are quite consistent with our model. If you ask people why they are demonstrating, many of them complain about the institutions themselves, about corruption, about unfairness.”