Why have the Visegráds – i.e. Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia – dissimilarly deviated from the political economy status quo of the early 2000s, even though their transition to liberal market democracy and FDI-led development had proven successful? This dissertation argues that the Visegráds’ policy deviations in industry, finance and socioeconomic policy are divergent responses to the two core developmental challenges of accumulation and redistribution. Their position of semi-peripheral dependency in the global economy amplifies these challenges. In other words, the Visegráds have dealt with dependency differently. To explain this variation, this dissertation takes a comprehensive view on policy change by integrating three main political economy perspectives: voter support, business power and political entrepreneurship. Based on this synthesis, it argues that different types of alliances composed of social classes of voters and business actors, forged by the strategic agency of challenger parties, lead to diverse policy packages. Using several instruments of analysis and types of data, including class-based voter analysis and elite interviews, the thesis empirically dissects the domestic processes of policy change. Foremost, it shows how variation in alliance constellations and political entrepreneurship shape national responses to dependency in terms of strategies to address the core challenges of accumulation and redistribution. Especially when societal discontent with the performance of the political economy is high, lower-class voters and domestic businesses mobilise in opposition to the status quo. Ultimately, the thesis demonstrates that semi-peripheral political economies are not simply constrained by dependency. Domestic class struggle matters and determined, entrepreneurial political agency can, under the right conditions, by unifying diverse interests effectuate substantial deviation and even antistatus quo change. As such, the dissertation contributes to regional studies by both comprehensively and comparatively accounting for policy change in the Visegráds as well as to the political economy scholarship which seeks to integrate different theoretical perspectives to understand the politics of (socio)economic policy and growth models/regimes.