The paper discusses the significance and role of subnational democracy in the context of new European democracies in flux. In a context of fragile democratic traditions, the displacement of national sovereignty, and increasing civic adverseness to national politics, local forms of representative...

Following 1989, the public discussion and examination of the history of secret police agents happened in an inadequate, unsatisfactory manner: Hungarian society was unable to come to terms with its former informers. This proved to be a loss not only for the victims, “the targets”, but also...

FIDESZ, as an outlawed protest movement of the Kádár era, has preserved their specific type of “outlawed and clandestine” political tradition and identity. A strong anti-communism, a popular mobilizing strategy and an atmosphere of hatred towards the agents of Hungary’s communist past...

Serbia and Croatia, both actors in civil wars during the 1990s, started their transformation by emerging from the same model of “liberal socialism”. The two countries had authoritarian regimes with nationalistic mobilization, and their respective transformations developed under the control...

As commonly expressed, populism is a synonym of demagogy, or an adjective used to describe and criticize the set of tools of a political movement. The meaning of democracy as constructed by language users is dynamically-changing and contextually bound. The interpretation of these two concepts is...

On the 26-27th of November, the Central European University’s Center for EU Enlargement Studies and the Hungarian MTA KRTK VGI co-hosted several presentations and keynote lectures at the CEU campus in Budapest. The conference proved highly attractive for our community of economic sociologists...

Representative politics is in crisis. Trust in politicians is at an all-time low.These are the initial remarks in Simon Tormey’s new book. Simon Tormey is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Sydney. His research areas are Contemporary Political Theory and Global Politics,...

A kérdőíves vizsgálatot (survey technique) tipikusan kvantitatív módszernek tartják. A rugalmas kérdőív (elastic survey) a survey technika megújítását szorgalmazza, kvalitatív módszertani alapokon, a kulturális antropológiából és kommunikációelméletből átvett előképek...

The paper compares the political leadership of Silvio Berlusconi and Viktor Orbán from the beginning of their political careers to 2014, Besides giving a descriptive comparison of the Italian and Hungarian political leaders, the paper focuses on two questions: (1) the nature of their populism;...