I have a new paper out in the European Journal of Sociology! Commodification and Social Reproduction: Theory and Mixed-Method Evidence on the Effect of Privatization on Childbearing. I have friends who do brilliant work on #social #reproduction, take #Marx seriously, but don’t find #demography inspiring. I also have demographer friends who do brilliant work on #fertility but don’t know social reproduction theory and don’t take Marx seriously. Putting these two worlds in dialogue was always going to be a tall order. That’s also what motivated this study. Economic production and social reproduction are two sides of the same coin. Social reproduction theory asks a deceptively simple question: if workers produce value, who produces workers? And how are the costs of producing and sustaining life #distributed across genders, households, markets, and the state? We argue that these are not side questions but core to understanding the #postsocialist #fertility #decline. This is not a minor story. Around 15 of the world’s 20 fastest #shrinking populations are located in Eastern Europe, with low fertility as a major driver. Empirically, we combine cross-national panel models with subnational and qualitative evidence to trace the mechanism. #Privatization and commodification shift risk downward, reorganize household budgets and time, and make #childbearing a far more uncertain project. Marketization does not just reshape jobs and incomes. It reaches into intimate life decisions by transforming the conditions of social reproduction. I’m grateful to all my co-authors Lawrence King, @EvaFodor_CEU, Raymond Caraher, and Gosta Esping-Andersen. Co-authoring with Gosta, a doyen of welfare state theory and social demography, was quite an experience. As the acknowledgements section demonstrates, many contributed to this study. I’d like to flag the help from @azarrova, Darja Irdam, @gigoca, @EszterKovats, @LMurinko, @i_reprosoc, and @DorottyaSzikra. A peek behind the scenes, because behind every success in academia there are dozens of invisible setbacks. This paper took around eight years from first idea to publication. It went through multiple submissions, a second-round rejection at a top journal (American Journal of Sociology), and several R&Rs that would have required reshaping the argument in ways that would have hollowed out what the paper is trying to say. Part of this reflects how broken the academic publication game is. Part of it reflects the paper’s unusual niche. It relies on advanced quantitative tools, but it is not a clean causal inference design. It is also theoretically hybrid, and the tensions between social reproduction scholarship and mainstream demography made some pushback almost inevitable. A lot changed in my life over these eight years. I lived in six cities, in five countries, across three continents. I held multiple precarious contracts and lived through major political upheavals. There was one “comforting” constant, though: this paper was almost always under review somewhere. Not anymore. As they say: Each article is its own Vietnam — easy to get into, hard to get out of. In the end, it found a very good permanent home at EJS. In the end, it found a very good permanent home at EJS. Comments welcome! #politicalconomy #sociology @GUQatar @QNLib

I started my book talks at @Georgetown, @GWtweets, and @KetteringFdn with a personal anecdote. A trip down memory lane, to a small room in the 2000s packed with activists and big hopes, to an era when the future unquestionably belonged to democracy, and many believed another world is possible. How did we get from there to where we are now? What is the triple devaluation? And how will democracies revive? Book forhtcoming next year with Stanford University Press.Snapshots from sunny October DC. #democracy #FarRight #illiberalism #globaljustice @GUQatar

Hey friends in DC! I'm arriving later today for two weeks. Drop by if you are interested in hearing what we've been up to with @javorbenedek at one of the three talks introducing our forthcoming @Stanford University Press book, How Democracies Revive: Why Illiberalism Keeps Winning and What to Do About It: 1. @Georgetown University, The MA in Democracy and Governance, Mortara Center for International Studies, and Democracy Initiative October 15, 2026, 12:00pm - 1:30pm EDT, 3600 N Street NW, Washington, DC 20007 events.georgetown.edu/event/… 2. @GWtweets, @ILLSP_GWU @IERES_GWU, in conversation with the multi-talented @MSnegovaya: October 21, 2026, 4 pm - 5 pm, GWU Elliott School of International Affairs, 1957 E Street Northwest, Suite 412, Voesar Conference Room, Washington, DC 20052 eventbrite.com/e/how-democra… 3. @KetteringFdn Foundation, in conversation with Paloma Dallas, Senior Program Officer for Democracy around the Globe. This one will be streamed live as well: October 22, 2026, 12:00-2:00 pm EDT, 1299 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, Suite 1120, Washington, DC 20004 globaldemocracycoalition.org… *** Despite occasional setbacks, #illiberalism keeps winning, from India and the United States to Germany. Analytical frameworks remain polarized among cultural backlash, economic grievance, and illiberal-playbook accounts. Each explains part of the picture, but none captures the comprehensiveness of the illiberal challenge. This talk, drawing on a forthcoming Stanford University Press book that blends scholarly research with insider political experience, proposes a relational materialist framework. It traces illiberalism to the contradictions of an uneven and shifting hierarchical global economic order, which generate a triple #devaluation of economic status, cultural worth, and political voice that illiberal movements mobilize. The balance of political forces across these intertwined fields of struggle, above all the capacity of democratic actors to answer the triple devaluation, determines the outcome. The talk draws on successful cases of #democractic revival, from South Korea and Uruguay to Hungary in 2026, to identify what durable democratic countervailing power requires. BIO: Gábor Scheiring’s research traces the path from the polycrisis of liberal globalism through social disintegration and embodied suffering to democratic decline, while mapping the responses that foster economic and political revival. He is the author of How Democracies Revive, the award-winning Retreat of Liberal Democracy (Palgrave, 2020), and dozens of studies published in leading journals across multiple disciplines. He is an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University in Qatar, with previous appointments at Harvard, Cambridge, and Bocconi. A former member of the Hungarian Parliament (2010–2014), he brings firsthand knowledge of the political dynamics his research examines. #illiberalism #FarRight #democracy @GUQatar

Contract signed across three continents, so now I am ready to believe it: @Stanford University Press will publish our book with @javorbenedek, How Democracies Revive: Why Illiberalism Keeps Winning and What to Do About It. ✨📖🤓 It was an absolute pleasure writing this with such an amazing co-author, reconnecting with our old shared memories and reviving them with new analytical insights. Thank you, Bence! When we started on his suggestion, we were committed, but this milestone seemed a long way off. And this is only the end of the beginning. The book will come out by next fall at the latest, and we are already planning the book talks. Recommendations and invitations welcome! The book combines scholarly research with insider political experience and proposes a relational materialist framework for understanding the rise of the far right. We trace illiberalism to the contradictions of an uneven, shifting, hierarchical global economic order. That order produces a triple devaluation of economic status, cultural worth, and political voice, which illiberal movements then mobilize. The outcome depends on the balance of political forces across these intertwined fields of struggle, and above all on whether democratic actors can offer a credible answer to that devaluation. We decided to intervene because the debate remains split into three camps: cultural backlash, economic grievance, and the illiberal playbook. Each explains part of the picture. None of them accounts for how comprehensive the illiberal challenge has become, and that comprehensiveness is closely tied to the persistent weakness of pro-democracy forces. There is good news too. Democracy is reviving in Hungary, in Uruguay, in South Korea, and in the US, in the resistance to Trump. The book draws out what these successful pro-democracy cases have in common and ends with concrete recommendations for strategy and policy. More on that later. For now, let us just pause at this milestone and sit with this certainty that SUP is going to publish the book next year. #democracy #illiberalism #FarRight @GUQatar

🤦‍♀️ On Berlin: There's a center-right party that says cut welfare and regulation, and growth will trickle down and pay your rent. There's a social democratic party that says hmm, ohm, ahm, ooo, it's complicated. There's a green party whose ex-chairperson championed a "values-based feminist foreign policy" under which killing 70K people apparently counted as self-defense. There's a far right that says the migrant next door is the reason you can't find a job and afford your flat anymore. And there's a left party that says: make the city affordable, socialize the big landlords, and make foreign policy humanist. The establishment cried antisemitism, horseshoe, far-left far-right danger etc. The humanist left won anyway, 25.7%, more than doubling its vote. The establishment center collapsed. 85% of households in Berlin rent, and 52% said housing costs were the top electoral issue. The writing is on the wall folks: time to get back to reality. 🌤️

New piece just out, currently on @jacobin's front page, on the AfD's 44% in Saxony-Anhalt and why the standard explanations for the far right keep failing. Already in the run up to the election, the German commentariat went looking for the "one" variable. The bureaucracy is too slow - need to cut it. East Germans have a defective political culture - need to educate them. It's immigration - need to toughen up. Merz concluded that the government simply hadn't explained its excellent policies clearly enough. Thirteen years of uninterrupted AfD growth, 20 years of rising illiberalism globally, and the diagnosis is a communication problem. What level of intellectual nihilism is this? The institutionalist story fails because the far right is global: it's now Europe's most popular party family, and every country blames its own local quirk. The Ossi-bashing story fails because the same servile-national-character thesis was applied to Poles and Hungarians, among many others, right up until they voted their illiberal governments out. And the cultural backlash story of old uneducated man, still the most influential and by now the most thoroughly refuted theory of populism, fails on the basic facts: the AfD was founded by neoliberal economists, its chief whip has a Hayek portrait on his office wall, it won 41 percent of first-time voters, and its biggest donors are a diagnostics magnate and a real estate billionaire. This is exclusionary nationalism as a rebranding of neoliberalism, the path Fidesz, the Republicans, and Reform UK & co have all taken. Misdiagnosis produces dead-end strategies. The firewall creates a dual political sphere that leaves the theme of change to the far right and produces coalitions that cannot govern. Copying its migration program doesn't work either; Merz tried it in January 2025 and the AfD doubled its vote four weeks later. And "let them govern and watch them fail" rests on one Austrian data point from 2002 that the FPÖ has since thoroughly falsified. I also have sixteen years of "demystifying the far right in power" with Orbán to offer as a counterexample. The far right is a symptom of the exhaustion of the postwar class compromise that made liberal democracy possible in the first place. Polanyi and Gramsci worked this out for the 1930s, and their frameworks fit today with uncomfortable precision. German real wages have stagnated since the early 1990s; 89 percent of AfD voters in Saxony-Anhalt fear they cannot pay their bills; the state has lost a quarter of its population since reunification. Wherever the industrial crisis concentrates, the far right is strongest, including in the old SPD strongholds of the Ruhr. Polanyi identified two exits from this kind of paralysis. One was fascism. The other was social democracy. So far, today's "polycrisis" has produced only the first answer. As long as we keep reading the far right one variable at a time, nobody will offer the second answer. Full piece here: jacobin.com/2026/09/afd-cris… Thank you @broderly for the opportunity! #democracy #FarRight #Europe #illiberalism @GUQatar