CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 97Asian Industrial and Economic DevelopmentState Capitalism and Financial GovernanceChina's Socioeconomic Reforms and Governance

What Is “Authoritarian” About Authoritarian Capitalism? The Dual Erosion of the Private–Public Divide in State-Dominated Business Systems

Open access
Sallai, Dorottya, Schnyder, Gerhard·2021·Business & Society
DOI 10.1177/0007650319898475
Open this paper in CoChat — free accountOpen PDF

Abstract

The “return of the state” as an economic actor has left scholars at a lack of theoretical tools to capture the characteristics of state-dominated business systems. This is reflected in the fact that any type of state intervention in the economy is too easily qualified as a sign of “authoritarian capitalism,” which has led scholars to lump together countries as diverse as China, Singapore, and Norway under that heading. Rather than considering any type of state intervention in the economy as authoritarian, we propose a more sophisticated conceptualization, which distinguishes two boundaries between the public and the private domains and conceives of the “return of the state” as the erosion of one or both of them. This conceptualization allows us to clearly distinguish a shift from an ideal-typical market-based “regulatory capitalism” to “state capitalism” or “authoritarian capitalism,” respectively. We use interview data with business leaders in an extreme case of the return of the state to identify the nature of the mechanisms by which an authoritarian government erodes these private-public divides. We argue that a focus on these constitutive mechanisms of the erosion of private-public divides allows us to define “authoritarian capitalism” in a way that makes it a useful tool to understand contexts beyond the Chinese case in which it first emerged.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1177/0007650319898475

Cites

71 of 71 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Foreign investors prefer to invest in democratic countries.

    “studies provide overwhelming evidence that foreign investors prefer to invest in democratic countries, 90”

    From Authoritarian collaboration and repression in the digital age: balancing foreign direct investment and control in internet infrastructure (2026) · cites this paper as [90]

    The Data and Method section describes democratic backsliding in East Central Europe, while Data and analysis describes interviews with foreign firms in Hungary (page numbers unavailable). Neither passage addresses whether foreign investors prefer democratic countries. Searches for investor preferences, investment decisions, and foreign direct investment found no passage making that comparison. (LLM, conf=0.76)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Research works printed but not linked: 18

  1. BBJ. (2012, September 29) Hungary's new nationalization plans could cost a fortune. Budapest Business Journal. Retrieved July 27, 2019 from: http://www.bbj.hu/economy/hungarys-new-nationalization-plans-could-cost-a- fortune_64073.
  2. Deyo, F. C. (1989). Labor and development policy in East Asia. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 505, 152-161.
  3. Ekiert, G. (2012). The Illiberal Challenge in Post-Communist Europe. Taiwan Journal of Democracy, 8(2), 63-77.
  4. Evans, P. (1995). Embedded autonomy: State & industrial transformation. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
  5. Hajnal, G. & Rosta, M. (2014). The illiberal state on the local level -The doctrinal foundations of subnational governance reforms in Hungary (2010-2014). EGPA Annual Conference, Speyer, Germany.
  6. Hayek, F. A. (1960). The constitution of liberty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  7. Henderson, L. (1991). Authoritarianism and the Rule of Law. Indiana Law Journal, 66(2), 379-456.
  8. In Pearce, D. W. Siebert, H., & Walter I. (Eds.), Risk and the Political Economy of Resource Development (pp. 137ff). London: Palgrave Macmillan.
  9. Laki, M. (2015) A trafikpiac átalakulása és átalakítása (esettanulmány) 1. (Restructuring and re-regulation of the Hungarian tobacco market). Szociológiai Szemle, 25(3): 23-51.
  10. Lawton, T., Rajwani, T., & Doh, J. (2013). The antecedents of political capabilities. International Business Review, 22(1), 228-242.
  11. Lendvai, P. (2017). Orbán: Europe's new strongman. Oxford, UK, Oxford University Press.
  12. Martin, R. (2008). Post-socialist segmented capitalism: The case of Hungary. Human Relations, 61(1), 131-159.
  13. Müller, J.-W. (2017). What is populism? London: Penguin Books.
  14. Orenstein, M. A. (2013). Reassessing the neo-liberal development model in Central and Eastern Europe. In Schmidt, V. & Thatcher, M. (Eds.) Resilient Liberalism in Europe's Political Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  15. Sass, M. (2017). Is a live dog better than a dead lion? Seeking alternative growth engines in the Visegrad countries. In Galgoczi, B. & Drahokoupil, J. (Eds.) Condemned to be left behind? Can Central and Eastern Europe emerge from its low-wage model? (pp. 47-79) Brussels: ETUI -Brussels.
  16. Scherer, A. G., & Palazzo, G. (2011). The new political role of business in a globalized world. Journal of Management Studies, 48(4), 899-931.
  17. Sedelmeier, U. (2014). Anchoring democracy from above ? The European Union and democratic backsliding in Hungary and Romania after accession. Journal of Common Market Studies, 52(1), 105-121.
  18. Transparency International (2012) Corruption risks in Hungary 2011: National integrity study. Berlin: Transparency International Transparency International (2018, February 21) Hungary at a historic low in Transparency International's most recent world corruption ranking, Transparency International Hungary, Retrieved July 27, 2019 from https://transparency.hu/wp- content/uploads/2018/02/CPI-press-release-2017-1.pdf

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

Authors
Sallai, D., & Schnyder, G.
Affiliations
  • London School of Economics and Political Science (GB)
  • Loughborough University (GB)
Corresponding author
Sallai, Dorottya
ORCID
Venue
Business & Society
Publisher
SAGE Publications
Published
2020-01-15
Volume
60
Issue
6
Pages
1312-1348
ISSN
  • 0007-6503 (ISSN-L)
  • 1552-4205
DOI
10.1177/0007650319898475
OpenAlex
W2995822815
Cited by
97
References
71
Citations by year
2026: 18 · 2025: 22 · 2024: 16 · 2023: 15 · 2022: 16 · 2021: 5 · 2020: 4 · 2019: 1
FWCI
34.73
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
Locations
  • Business & Society (publishedVersion)
  • London School of Economics and Political Science Research Online (London School of Economics and Political Science) (acceptedVersion)
  • London School of Economics and Political Science Theses Online (London School of Economics and Political Science) (submittedVersion, public-domain)
  • RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
  • Figshare (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
Funders
  • King's College London
  • Deakin University
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Asian Industrial and Economic Development
  • Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Strategy and Management › State Capitalism and Financial Governance
  • Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › China's Socioeconomic Reforms and Governance
Keywords
authoritarian capitalism, state capitalism, regulatory capitalism, return of the state, public and private spheres, state intervention in the economy, business systems, state-business relations, China, business executives

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review