21. See Hilary Appel, Mitchell Orenstein, From Triumph to Crisis: Neoliberal Economic Reform in Postcommunist Countries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
22. See Juliet Johnson, Andrew Barnes, “Financial Nationalism and Its International Enablers: The Hungarian Experience,” Review of International Political Economy 22, no. 3 (2015): 535–569.
23. See Dorottya Szikra, “Democracy and Welfare in Hard Times: Social Policy of the Orban Government in Hungary between 2010 and 2014,” Journal of European Social Policy 24, no. 5 (2014): 486–500; Fabry, The Political Economy of Hungary.
24. For example, Hungary was ranked as 50th among the countries in the annual Corruption Perception Index in 2010, while in 2019 its rank declined to 70th. See https://www.transparency.org, accessed September 7, 2021. According to the Rule of Law Index of the World Justice Project, Hungary was ranked as 36th in 2014, but was downgraded to 60th out of 128 countries by 2020. See https://worldjusticeproject.org/, accessed September 7, 2021.
25. For some accounts, see Anne Appelbaum, “Creeping Authoritarianism Has Finally Prevailed,” The Atlantic, April 3, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/hungary-coronavirus-just-excuse/609331/, accessed September 7, 2021; Will Collins, “Soft Authoritarianism Comes to Hungary,” The National Review, April 3, 2020, https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/soft-authoritarianism-comes-to-hungary, accessed September 7, 2021; John Stuttack, “Victor Orban’s Viral Authoritarianism,” The American Prospect, April 6, 2020, https://prospect.org/coronavirus/viktor-orban-viral-authoritarianism-hungary/, accessed September 7, 2021.
26. See Balint Magyar, Post-Communist Mafia State: The Case of Hungary (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2016).
27. For a systematic analysis of mafia as a phenomenon, see Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
28. See Stubborn Structures: Reconceptualizing Post-Communist Regimes, ed. Balint Magyar (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2019), 97–176.
29. For this argument, see Jussi Lassila, “Putin as a Non-Populist Autocrat,” Russian Politics 3, no. 2 (2018): 175–195.
30. See Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay, especially part IV.
31. See William R. Easterly, The Elusive Quest for Growth: Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), especially part II.
32. On these developments, see Vladimir Gel’man, “The Politics of Fear: How Russia’s Rulers Counter Their Rivals,” Russian Politics 1, no. 1 (2016): 27–45; Kirill Rogov, “The Art of Coercion: Repressions and Repressiveness in Putin’s Russia,” Russian Politics 3, no. 2 (2018): 151–174.
33. See Barbara Geddes, Joseph Wright, Erica Frantz, How Dictatorships Work: Power, Personalization, and Collapse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 187–190.
34. See Linda Cook, Aadne Aasland, Daria Prisyazhnyuk, “Russian Pension Reform under Quadruple Influence,” Problems of Post-Communism 66, no. 2 (2019): 96–108; Elena Maltseva, “The Politics of Retirement Age Increase in Russia: Proposals, Protests, and Concessions,” Russian Politics 4, no. 3 (2019): 375–399.
35. For an account of the 2020 constitutional changes in Russia, see Henry Hale, “Putin’s End Game,” PONARS Policy Memos, no. 638 (2020), www.ponarseurasia.org/memo/putins-end-game, accessed September 7, 2021.
36. See Milan Svolik, The Politics of Authoritarian Rule (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), especially chapter 4; Alexander Baturo, Democracy, Dictatorship, and Term Limits (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014); Geddes, Wright, Frantz, How Dictatorships Work, especially chapter 6.
37. See The Politics of Presidential Term Limits, eds. Alexander Baturo, Robert Elgie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019); Farid Guliyev, “Is Putin Emulating Azerbaijan in 2008–09? Modifying Term Limits under Economic Uncertainty,” PONARS Policy Memos, no. 647 (2020), www.ponarseurasia.org/memo/putin-emulating-azerbaijan-2008-09-modifying-term-limits, accessed September 7, 2021.
38. See Russia after the Global Economic Crisis, eds. Anders Åslund, Sergei Guriev, Andrew C. Kuchins (Washington, DC: Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2010).
39. See Anton Feinberg, “Gil’otina ot pravitel’stva: kak vlasti khotyat snizit’ trebovaniya k biznesu,” rbc.ru, January 15, 2019, https://www.rbc.ru/economics/15/01/2019/5c3df76f9a7947214d11adcf, accessed September 7, 2021; “Tsel’ regulyatornoi gil’otiny—ne ubit’ kontrol’ i nazdor, a sozdat’ novuyu sistemu,” hse.ru, April 11, 2019, https://www.hse.ru/news/science/261723973.html, accessed September 7, 2021.
40. See Ivan Grigoriev, Anna Dekalchuk, “Collective Learning and Regime Dynamics under Uncertainty: Labour Reform and the Way to Autocracy in Russia,” Democratization 24, no. 3 (2017): 481–497; see also chapter 4 of this book.
41. For analysis of the case of police reform in Russia, which was loudly announced by Dmitry Medvedev but had a negligible effect, see Brian Taylor, “The Police Reform in Russia: Policy Process in a Hybrid Regime,” Post-Soviet Affairs 30, no. 2–3 (2014): 226–255.
42. See Mikhail Sokolov, “Can Russian Research Policy Be Called Neoliberal? A Study in the Comparative Sociology of Quantification,” Europe-Asia Studies 73, no. 6 (2021): 989–1009; Katerina Guba, Angelika Tsivinskaya, “Evaluating the Evaluators in Russia: When Academic Citizenship Fails,” Europe-Asia Studies 73, no. 6 (2021): 1010–1036.
43. On “regulatory capture,” see George J. Stigler, “The Theory of Economic Regulation,” The Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science 2, no. 1 (1971): 3–21.