Bálint Magyar:
The Post-Communist Mafia State
Bálint Magyar is sociologist, former Minister of Education for Hungary and is currently senior researcher at the Financial Research Institute in Budapest. In the past few years he developed his concept, the "mafia state" which received a remarkable international attention in the scholarly community. Magyar co-edited three books on the mafia state in Hungarian between 2013 and 2015. His 2015 authored book, The Anatomy of the Hungarian Mafia State, argued that politics in Hungary have been warped by the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of a political family. Mafia state is a system in itself which should be considered as a sub-type of autocracy. This book has been translated to English, Russian, Bulgarian and Polish and was already published in English and Russian in 2016. His co-edited book in English will come out at Central University Press later this year. Magyar's OSF fellowship project tests the mafia state thesis in several Eastern European countries and the former Soviet Union.
Besides being a minister for six years altogether, Magyar has served as state secretary for development policy in the office of the prime minister of Hungary, and vice president of the National Development Council. He holds a doctorate in political economy from Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest.