What makes authoritarian capitalism Authoritarian? The double erosion of the private-public divide in illiberal Hungary

For several decades, the Business and Society literature has mainly focused on the retreat of the state from the economy in Western countries since the 1980s. As a result, the “return of the state” as an economic actor, especially in emerging markets, has left scholars without the necessary tools to capture this trend of the “politicization of the economic.” Thus, we argue that current conceptualizations of state-dominated systems as “authoritarian capitalism” too easily lump together countries as diverse as China, Singapore, and Norway under this heading. Rather than considering any type of state intervention in the economy as authoritarian, we propose a more sophisticated conceptualization of the extension of the political into the economic, which allows us to clearly distinguish cases of “state capitalism” from “authoritarian capitalism.” We apply our framework to the case of Hungary to illustrate that a more precise definition of “authoritarian capitalism” makes it a useful tool to understand contexts beyond the Chinese case in which it first emerged. Based on interviews with business leaders in Hungary under Viktor Orbán’s government, we identify the mechanisms by which an authoritarian government expands the political into the economic realm, eroding the public-private divide; moving thus from “democratic backsliding” into “economic backsliding.