Ivan Szelenyi

Research focuses on the study of social inequality. He identified for the first time the state socialist economy as a redistributive system and demonstrated the equalizing role of market forces in such economies. He developed a theory of social structure of socialist societies and from the analysis of social contradictions of these social systems predicted the disintegration of the communist social order. His research during the early 1990s centered on elite reproduction during post-communist transformation. Recent research deals with poverty and ethnicity in transitional societies.