Gábor Scheiring

Gábor Scheiring is an assistant professor of comparative politics at Georgetown University in Qatar and a Spring 2024 visiting scholar at Harvard’s Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, where he is working on a new book, Shocks Without Therapy, comparing the postsocialist mortality crisis and the American deaths of despair epidemic. He researches the lived experience and political economy of capitalist transformations, analyzing how economic shocks fuel inequalities in health and well-being and how these inequalities affect the stability of growth models and democracy. His book The Retreat of Liberal Democracy (Palgrave, 2020), winner of the BASEES 2021 Book Award, shows how working-class dislocation and business elite co-optation enable illiberalism in Eastern Europe. His studies on economic shocks and welfare examine how rapid economic change increases mental and physical suffering, eroding the legitimacy of the liberal world order. His work has appeared in leading journals such as the British Journal of Political Science, Lancet Global Health, Theory and Society, Cambridge Journal of Economics, and the Annual Review of Sociology. In a previous life, he was a social organizer and a member of the Hungarian parliament (2010-2014).