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One striking aspect of the coronavirus crisis was the poor response of the right-wing populist leaders to the pandemic in countries such as the US, Britain, and Brazil. Despite this fact, the continuing voter support right-wing populist leaders attract across countries with different socio-economic traits is puzzling. In this paper, we argue in favour of a cognitive anthropological view of populism scholarship. Cognitive and evolutionary anthropology shows that mental systems common to all humans shape the way we understand the world, making some ideas more plausible than others regardless of their levels of accuracy. Even though the action of 'building a wall' to keep illegal migrants away can prove ultimately unfeasible and does not address real immigration issues, due to our cognitive evolution, it makes intuitive sense as a plausible option to reducing immigration. Populist leaders exploit our cognitive intuitions by providing such intractable but oftentimes intuitively-plausible ideas in order to get elected or to promote preferred policies. Furthermore, we intuitively admire powerful individuals and tend to defer to authoritative and charismatic figures as an evolutionary strategy for acquiring valued skills and negotiating hierarchies. As a result, by committing to the intuitively-plausible policies populist leaders promote, such as 'building a wall', they give additional credence to the political beliefs that are based on our cognitive intuitions, effectively increasing their plausibility for the "common folk".

This is an exploratory study of populist political movement Sme rodina – Boris Kollár (We Are a Family – Boris Kollár, since November 2019 only Sme rodina). The paper first locates this movement into a lose concept/sui generis family of political parties (the niche party), arguing in contrast to some typologies that this is primarily protest populist party presenting some niche issues, and only secondarily, an entrepreneurial party. The paper also answers the question why this party is considered as being populist by many political and non-political actors and analysts. The paper also suggests that there is actually non-existent, but assumed direct correlation between the support for this party and the decline in the standard of living, as sometimes presented in public discourse. In contrast, it is suggested here that there may be stronger links between relative poverty, feeling of being abandoned by political elites/parties, and low educational levels. Moreover, there played an important role previous knowledge (celebrity status) of the party leader who was often presented and discussed in tabloid media. For this reason, many young females voted for this party. The party also managed to raise a widely perceived problematic issue that was seen as not tackled sufficiently or at all by the previous governments and other competing political parties (the niche or salient issue).

Tanulmányunk a nemzetközi rendszer átalakulásával foglalkozik, azt Polányi kettős mozgásának a nemzetközi politikai gazdaságtan három vizsgálati szintjére (rendszer szintje, nemzetállam szintje, ideák szintje) való kiterjesztésével mutatja be. A cél annak az ingamozgásnak a bemutatása, mely az önszabályozó piac és a Bretton Woodsi "beágyazott liberalizmus" között írható le. Bemutatjuk azt is, hogy a populista pártok napjainkban megfigyelhető növekvő népszerűsége a piacosító folyamatokkal szembeni ellenmozgásként értelmezhető. = Our paper examines the transformation of the international economic system. We examine the process of Polanyi's double movement on the three levels of analysis of the international political economy: systemic, domestic and cognitive. Our aim is to show that during the development of the international system a certain pendulum is present which swings between the idea of the self-regulating market and 'the embedded liberalism' of the Bretton Woods System. We will also show, that the increasing popularity of populist political parties might be also understood as a countermovement against forces of marketization.