By Kutup Aytekin
For decades, scholars have assumed a positive relationship between welfare generosity and the level of democracy. In this essay, Kutup Aytekin challenges this consensus by exploring the rise of authoritarian welfarism. Contrasting traditional welfare regimes literature with contemporary scholarship, he argues that right-wing autocratizing governments are actively instrumentalizing social policy — recalibrating rather than retrenching welfare systems to secure loyalty and ensure regime stability.
Over the last two decades, a number of prominent welfare policy initiatives have emerged from right-wing autocratizing political parties. While operating in hybrid and authoritarian regimes, these parties have shaped their countries’ welfare system through their conservative, populist, and sometimes nativist policy program after assuming power. In Turkey, the Erdoğan administration undertook sweeping social security reforms that facilitated more equal access to benefits and services. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz government significantly expanded its flagship family policy and public works programs, often in tandem with electoral cycles. In Poland, Law and Justice’s (PiS) Family 500+ (Rodzina 500+) program dramatically reduced child poverty.
These developments sit uneasily with a long-standing assumption in the welfare regimes literature: that higher levels of democracy are associated with more generous welfare provision. Classical accounts of welfare state development tend to link redistribution to democratic competition, voter pressure, and the strength of left-wing actors. At the same time, this body of scholarship has paid relatively limited attention to right-wing populist actors as proactive designers of welfare policy.
In recent years, however, a growing body of scholarship has begun to address these blind spots by examining welfare politics in autocratizing contexts. This essay contrasts the traditional literature on welfare regimes with these contemporary contributions in order to show how the field has evolved. It argues that authoritarian and autocratizing governments should not be understood simply as dismantlers of welfare systems, but as actors capable of reshaping and instrumentalizing social policy in ways that reflect both ideological commitments and regime-maintenance strategies.
The traditional literature on welfare regimes generally posits a positive relationship between welfare generosity and the level of democracy. Several influential approaches converge on this expectation, albeit through different mechanisms. One strand emphasizes electoral competition, arguing that political parties converge toward the preferences of the median voter, which include support for redistributive policies (Meltzer and Richards 1981; Rudra and Haggard 2005). Another strand foregrounds interest group politics and the capacity of organized actors to secure redistributive benefits (Brown and Hunter 1999; Grossman and Helpman 2002; Hacker and Pierson 2002). A third builds on power resources theory, highlighting the role of left-wing parties and trade unions in expanding welfare provision (Esping-Andersen 1985).
Taken together, these approaches imply that democratic competition, representation, and left-wing mobilization sustain expansive welfare states. By implication, processes of autocratization should lead to retrenchment. Yet developments in countries such as Turkey, Hungary, and Poland challenge this expectation.
The limitations of this traditional scholarship can be summarized along three lines. First, it exhibits a democracy bias, treating democratic competition as the primary engine of welfare expansion while leaving little room to theorize redistribution under authoritarian rule. Second, it suffers from a degree of actor blindness, overlooking right-wing populist and autocratizing movements as intentional architects of welfare systems. Third, it relies on static expectations, equating autocratization with welfare retrenchment and failing to anticipate the possibility of restructuring, recomposition, or strategic expansion of social policy. These shortcomings help explain why recent empirical developments have been difficult to accommodate within established frameworks.
Recent scholarship has begun to address these limitations by reassessing the relationship between regime type and welfare provision. Szikra and Öktem, for example, argue that democratic backsliding does not necessarily lead to welfare retrenchment. Examining Hungary and Turkey, they show that autocratization is more accurately associated with restructuring than with cutbacks. In Hungary, reductions in certain areas of social spending were partially offset by expanded family tax credits and workfare programs. In Turkey, by contrast, welfare spending as a share of GDP increased relative to the pre-Erdoğan period, alongside the expansion of healthcare coverage and conditional cash transfer programs. These cases illustrate that authoritarian governments can recalibrate welfare systems in line with their political priorities, rather than simply dismantling them.
Complementing this perspective, Panaro (2025) challenges the view of authoritarian policymaking as uniformly top-down and insulated from societal pressures. While considering factors such as formal political institutions and the size of ruling coalitions, he ultimately finds that these variables do not systematically drive social spending. Instead, his quantitative analysis identifies ideology – specifically left-wing orientation – as the most robust predictor of welfare expansion in authoritarian contexts. Despite the rigorous quantitative analysis, Panaro acknowledges the fact that there are only a few “purely left-wing autocracies” is a limitation on his research.
However, Panaro’s argument still broadens the literature’s analytical framework by highlighting the role of ideological commitments even in non-democratic settings. Moreover, his argument can be connected to right-wing autocratizing parties, as these movements have launched and implemented their welfare agenda through their own ideological commitments. For example, Fidesz aligned its social policy with its broader vision of the ‘work-based society’, which rewards those who work hard and withholds support from surplus populations who supposedly refuse to take up formal employment (Scheiring and Szombati 2021). Conversely, PiS’s downwardly redistributive welfare policy is aligned with the absence of the key distinction between ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ citizens (Bill and Stanley 2025). In both of these cases, the ideological commitments and political vision of right-wing autocratizing parties have clearly shaped their social policies.
Another strand of the emerging literature interprets welfare policy as a tool of political survival. From this perspective, social spending is not only redistributive but also strategic. Mares and Carnes (2009) propose a “collusive” model in which regimes extend targeted benefits to key constituencies in order to secure their loyalty. Similarly, Zheng (2024) argues that variation in authoritarian regime types shapes how governments use social policy to co-opt critical actors, with single-party regimes being particularly prone to welfare expansion due to their broader support coalitions. Knutsen and Rasmussen (2018) further suggest that policies such as pension programs can help solve credible commitment problems and reduce the likelihood of regime breakdown.
Despite these important contributions, this emerging literature also contains internal tensions and conceptual ambiguities. For instance, some accounts expand the definition of social policy to include indirect mechanisms such as access to subsidized credit. A prominent example is the tendency to frame Turkey’s state-directed credit expansion ahead of the 2023 elections as a welfare initiative, rather than a pillar of unorthodox monetary policy. While such measures may have distributive effects, categorizing them as welfare policy risks conceptual overstretch, particularly when beneficiaries ultimately bear repayment obligations. Similarly, disagreements persist regarding the relative importance of ideology versus regime structure. While Panaro emphasizes ideological orientation, Zheng underscores the role of institutional configurations and coalition dynamics. These differing findings suggest that a unified theory of authoritarian social policy may remain elusive. Consequently, a central challenge for future scholarship will be determining whether these distinct drivers – ideology and institutional configuration – operate independently, or if they converge in ways we do not yet fully understand.
Overall, our understanding of welfare regimes in authoritarian and autocratizing contexts has undergone a significant transformation. While earlier scholarship treated democracy as the primary determinant of welfare generosity, recent studies demonstrate that authoritarian regimes are also capable of designing and expanding social policy in strategic ways. These policies may serve multiple purposes: advancing ideological goals, reinforcing political coalitions, and securing regime stability. At the same time, they often entail trade-offs, exclusions, and internal contradictions that merit closer scrutiny.
These developments raise a number of questions that require further empirical and comparative investigation. What do right-wing authoritarian actors actually do once in government? To what extent do their welfare policies converge across cases such as Turkey, Hungary, and Poland, and where do they diverge? What is the balance between redistribution, clientelism, and conditionality in these systems? And ultimately, what are the strengths and weaknesses of this emerging model of right-wing “welfarism”? A forthcoming companion piece will address these questions by examining the concrete policy trajectories of these regimes and assessing their broader political and social implications.
Kutup Aytekin is Assistant Editor in the Political Economy and Inequalities section of the Review of Democracy.
This article is published under the sole responsibility of the author, with editorial oversight. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the editorial team or the CEU Democracy Institute.
References
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