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Both states that constituted the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy issued considerable amounts of perpetual bonds from the 1870s to World War I. These bonds constituted the greater part of the state debt, which was relatively larger in Hungary than in Austria. Movements in bond prices were not uniform for different kinds of securities such as gold bonds, paper bonds and bonds of the common debt of the pre-1867 era. Price movements and movements in the spread between Hungarian and Austrian bond yields followed a stochastic trend. Most fiscal factors such as the share of the state debt, and of state expenses, in GDP, the share of state consumption in overall state expenses, the relation between the debt service and the tax revenues, or the deficit in the state budget, had little or no impact. The conversion of debt instruments reveals a high degree of efficiency on the part of investors. Political crises affected relative price movements in the short run but were unimportant in the context of the middle- and long-term development. Throughout the period, Hungarian bonds as compared to Austrian bonds had lower prices in the Vienna Stock Exchange, suggesting a preference of Viennese investors for domestic securities independently from economic and political circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A growing number of studies investigate the relative importance of the major deservingness criteria (control, attitude, reciprocity, identity, need) in explaining the perceived welfare deservingness of different social groups. This paper addresses the roles of those criteria in predicting the perceived deservingness of a rarely examined group, single mothers. We conducted a survey in Hungary and compare the responses to direct questions about deservingness to the results of a vignette-based survey experiment in which the deservingness criteria were translated to characteristics of hypothetical mothers. Our results show that in the absence of deservingness cues (direct questions), respondents relied on the attitude, reciprocity/control, identity (measured by traditional family values), and need criteria to the same extent. On the other hand, in the presence of specific deservingness cues (vignette experiment), people disregarded their family values and stereotypes, and the perceived need became the strongest predictor of single mothers' deservingness. These results support the existence of the deservingness heuristic, however, compared to previous literature that emphasized the role of perceived control and reciprocity of recipients, in the case of single mothers, the deservingness heuristic seems to direct people's attention to the perception of need. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the first-ever rule of law conditionality procedure in September 2022, a resolution was adopted by the European Parliament which declared that Hungary could no longer be considered a full democracy, as it had turned into a 'hybrid regime of electoral autocracy'. Against this background, this article explains the business and human rights (BHR) gap in Hungary and presents its consequences for the Ukrainian refugee crisis. We first provide a general overview of the role of business in the development and consolidation of the Orbán regime over the past 13 years, highlighting how businesses are both agents and victims of legal and political developments. The paper distinguishes four types of 'business': multinational and foreign companies that are direct beneficiaries of the regime; local companies that are direct beneficiaries of the regime; multinational companies that are targets of restrictive and repressive populist rhetoric and economic policies; and the 'rest', the remainder that try to avoid becoming targets of oligarchic takeovers. The article also documents how the state and other stakeholders are failing to meet their commitments under the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs). The next part of the article assesses how companies are responding to the refugee crisis caused by the war in Ukraine, Hungary's neighbour. If the government does not adopt Pillar I and Pillar III of the UNGPs, what room for manoeuvre do companies have? The focus here is on how companies, domestic and foreign, multinational enterprises (MNEs) and small and medium enterprises (SMEs), engage in humanitarian (and human rights) crisis management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyzes how actual monetary policy changed following the official adoption of inflation targeting in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland and how it affected the volatilities of important macroeconomic variables in the years thereafter. To disentangle the effects of the policy shift from exogenous changes in the volatilities of these variables, a Markov-switching dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model is estimated that allows for regime switches in the policy parameters and the volatilities of shocks hitting the economies. Whereas estimation results reveal periods of high and low volatility for all three economies, the presence of different policy regimes is supported by the underlying data for the Czech Republic and Poland, only. In both economies, monetary policy switched from weak and unsystematic to strong and systematic responses to inflation dynamics. Simulation results suggest that the policy shifts of both central banks successfully reduced inflation volatility in the following years. The observed reduction in output volatility, on the other hand, is attributed more to a reduction in the size of external shocks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on Hungary's illiberal regimes from the perspective of the opposition – a perspective we believe has been under-scrutinized so far. It argues that in order to understand the regime's success it is crucial to explain why opposition parties have been unable to offer a credible alternative. The paper argues that the opposition is in a trap with three unfavourable factors mutually strengthening each other and undermining its ability for success. They are (1) the cartel party system; (2) the weak social embeddedness of opposition parties; and (3) lack of their presence in local politics. At the same time, we also point out that the rise of a tiny joke-party's success (The Hungarian Two-Tailed Dog Party) highlights that these obstacles can be overcome even with very limited resources. Nevertheless, it is still unclear if the Dog Party's innovative approach to doing politics could be 'institutionalized' – i.e. if it offers a feasible model strategy for opposition parties – or it is only an efficient way of mocking and criticizing how the political system operates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Hungarian judiciary has reacted to the political change of recent years in a twofold way. Some judges have resisted political pressure and decided cases according to the law and their conscience, while others, showing the signs of judicial populism, have deferred to the interests of the government. The paper explains the relationship between this twofold behavior and the bureaucratic tradition of the Hungarian justice system. The conclusion is that the bureaucratic model of organization has certain features that can make judges more resistant to political pressure, while other elements of the model can lead to judicial deference. Nonetheless, these latter elements are not necessary components of the 'Weberian' justice system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers an overview of the Hungarian translations of the Scriptures, printed in the sixteenth century. Both the translation of the Bible and print culture date from the fifteenth century in Hungary, but printing in Hungarian is a phenomenon of the sixteenth century. Before then, Scriptural chapters, translated by Hungarian Hussites and Minorite monks remained in manuscript, and the print of the Renaissance royal court served the needs of the humanist Latin literature. First, this paper will describe the development of the principles of translations from the cautious solutions of the Erasmian contributor of the first book printed in Hungarian, Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (Kraków, 1535), to the conceptions of the well-organized Calvinist group of scholars that edited the first complete Hungarian Bible (1590). In the analysis of the terminology this paper will focus on the expressions of the divine and earthly power, in the context of the history of political ideas of the same epoch. The history of the early printed Scriptures in Hungarian runs parallel to the gradual enlargement of the earthly power in early modern Hungarian political thought, under the conditions of the Turkish occupation, Hapsburg Catholicism, and the special status of Transylvania. In the history of religion, the dominant strain of the Hungarian Reformation turned from Luther to Calvin, with the most important Hungarian publishing house at the time being that of the Unitarians in Transylvania. This change greatly influenced the development of the Hungarian theoretical culture. For instance, the main destination of peregrinatio academica of Hungarians turned from Wittenberg to the universities of the Netherlands, and the Hungarian printers finally opted for the Humanist Antiqua instead of the German Frakturschrift. The second part of the paper will illustrate this process with examples of the typography of the sixteenth-century Hungarian Scriptures, and of their target audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is set to examine the state of gender equality in Central Eastern European Countries (CEECs) since accession to the European Union (EU) following the two enlargements in 2004 and 2007, which saw 10 CEECs join the EU. In this context, the paper addresses some implications of transformation, which challenge gender regimes across CEECs. The paper looks at the nature of the policies adopted to ensure gender equality in Central Eastern Europe (CEE) and, in particular, using Hungary's and Poland's family policies as a case study, it evaluates whether EU gender equality measures have had an impact on gender equality and justice in CEE and, more generally, whether they have led to new gender equality paradigms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper focuses on the methodological challenges of handling the material remains of banned theatre practices in Cold War Hungary. Focusing on the case of the collective Apartment Theatre (1972–6), it examines the relation of material remains, originally created by or for the socialist authorities in order to prove the danger caused by the collective, and the materials which were created by the group members as a countermovement to preserve their own memories and narratives. Consequently, archival practices of care as well as archival practices of suspicion together contribute to situating the collective in Hungarian and European cultural memory and theatre history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the repression and elimination of Roma from Hungarian society in the 1940s did not reach the same extent as in the German and Austrian part of the Third Reich, their characterization as lazy and work-shy, used to justify their persecution, was similar. This paper establishes the presence of racial hygienic discourse related to Roma during the late 1930s and the first half of the 1940s in Hungary, and traces its survival and influence on regional policy-making in the postwar period. It furthermore explores the transformation and adaptation of racism and eugenics to the socialist ideology of equality based on citizens’ participation in productive work in the early state socialist period, including the first Party declaration on the situation of Roma in Hungary in 1961. Specific attention is paid to the role of medical experts who discussed the “radical solution of the Gypsy-question” in the early 1940s and the immediate years following World War II. Reflecting on wider transformations of racism in the postcolonial and post-World War II period in Europe and North America, the paper contributes to scholarship that complicates the evaluation of the state socialist past, including the connection between medicine and politics in Cold War Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the rise of authoritarian trends in Hungary and in Poland, public broadcasters play a crucial role in supporting the political forces in power. There are many examples which show how public broadcasters influence public opinion by selective coverage and distorted remit. While the problem of media plurality is often commented upon from the perspective of fundamental rights or the rule of law, another relevant perspective is that of internal market and economic law. The article analyses how can one make sure that the use of public funds to support State media does not lead to the distortion of citizens' rights to be informed. The article argues that the current EU State Aid framework allows the balance of Member States' prerogatives in respect to media freedom and content with the risk of EU-imposed censure. The article analyses the place of media pluralism in EU law and demonstrates that media pluralism has been integrated within the internal market framework, including an analysis of recent amendments to the Audiovisual Media Services Directive. Then, it focuses on the relationship between media pluralism, public service broadcasting and EU State aid law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper interprets late medieval religious culture by considering lay expectations of and attitudes towards the clergy. The analysis is prompted by and framed around a convent controversy, which was extensively documented in the course of an ecclesiastical trial. Contemporary ‘convent reform’ is not conceived as an ecclesiastical event, but rather as a symptom of the changing relationship between town and convent. The description of religious provision in the town shows that there was a strong lay demand for the clergy and the rituals performed by them, and that parishioners were ready to invest financially in maintaining local priests, even if it involved considerable additional expenses. The conflict between town and convent can therefore be considered as a result of a liturgical deficit in the spiritual market of the town. The parishioners' behaviour is interpreted as a symptom of the eucharistic and penitential devotional culture of the time, which was regulated in practice by the principle of intercession and the institution of good works. The paper argues that the divergent strands of late medieval religious culture generated a ‘consumption’ of the sacred. The mendicant friars had a special role in the late medieval religious market as they provided opportunities for religious experiences which differed in kind from parish observances. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The papers of Sir Edward Denison Ross (1871–1940) at the Archives of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) include a series of letters from Hungary, which thank him for his contribution in bringing the world's attention to Alexander Csoma de Kőrös (1784–1842). Some of these letters were produced collectively by learned societies and signed by dozens of male and female members, but many were also written by ordinary people expressing their admiration for Csoma, the scholar who had walked most of the way from Transylvania to India in search of the roots of the Hungarian language and people. This lively response was a result of a lecture that Ross delivered on 5 January 1910 at the Asiatic Society of Bengal in Calcutta which became a sensation in Hungary in a matter of weeks. This article therefore looks at the phenomenon of how Ross's purely academic research, to use Albert von Le Coq's words, “touched a nation's heart” and earned him a celebrity status in Csoma's homeland. It is particularly interesting to uncover the motives behind this great publicity and show how it was orchestrated by two young Hungarians in Calcutta for not entirely unselfish purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The study describes Hungary's policy towards asylum seekers and refugees in the tense period of 2015-2016 before and after the erection of fences at its southern borders of Hungary. It offers a theoretical explanation of the legal measures and practical actions. After briefly reviewing the factual basis, that is the magnitude of the movements and the number of decisions taken in the EU and in Hungary and the pertinent legal changes in 2015-2016 it elaborates the theoretical fundaments. Securitization majority identitarian populism and crimmigration are invoked as explanatory frames. The paper then reassembles the factual elements under six headings showing them in a new light. These are: denial, deterrence, obstruction, punishment, free riding constituting lack of solidarity and breaching the law (international, European, domestic). Finally the question is raised if all these moves are compatible with the duty of loyal co-operation of Member States with each-other and the EU as prescribed by article Article 4 (3) TEU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are two contrasting claims regarding the Hungarian judiciary. The Government asserts that it is in the best shape, while many other voices label it as captured or dependent. This article shows how both of these claims can be true, depending on the interplay between formality and informality and shows how a few small loopholes allow some actors to rig the judicial system. Therefore, the Hungarian judiciary is similar to Schrödinger's cat, which is claimed to be dead and alive at the same time. The synergy between formality and informality requires a network of a handful of trusted people in managerial positions to administer case allocation, promotion, and disciplinary systems, which seem to be very effective tools. Few small technical loopholes and some special remedies suffice to micromanage important cases precisely because key positions are captured which work as gatekeepers or emergency brakes. Most of these tools are legal in a very formal technical sense of the word because they rely on acts of Parliament. A formal legalism, a very thin understanding of the Rule of law, and a majoritarian mindset serve as a legitimizing ideology for the whole legal system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on statistical sources, this paper examines to what extent citizens of the most advanced provincial cities in fin-de-siècle Hungary were multilingual. I argue that multilingualism was a far less present phenomenon than scholarship suggests. The exact features of multilingualism were closely connected to the local social relations (religion, gender, etc.) and market of languages. The growing nationalism promoted by the Hungarian government and the expansion of Magyar public space had an ambiguous impact on multilingualism, depending on the local society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Jurassic mélange complexes related to the subduction of the Neotethys Ocean occur in the Bükk Mountains, North Hungary. This paper characterizes the sedimentary sequence of basin and slope facies that occur in the southwestern part of the Bükk Mountains, placing special emphasis on the redeposited sedimentary rocks (olistostromes, olistoliths: Mónosbél Group) in order to obtain information on the provenance of the clasts, and the mode and time of their redeposition. The series of formations studied shows a general coarsening-upwards trend. Based on radiolarians and foraminifera, the Mónosbél Group formed in Early to Late Bathonian time. The lower part of the complex is typified by a predominance of pelagic carbonates, shale and radiolarite with andesitic volcaniclastic intercalations. The higher part of the succession is characterized by polymictic olistostromes. Large olistoliths that are predominantly blocks of Bathonian shallow marine limestone (Bükkzsérc Limestone) appear in the upper part of the sequence. Based on the biostratigraphic and sedimentological data, results of analyses of the redeposited clasts and taking into consideration the concepts of the development of the western Neotethys domain, the evolutionary stages of the sedimentary basins were defined. The onset of the compressional stage led to initiation of nappe stacking that led to the formation of polymict olistostromes and then to the redeposition of large blocks derived from out-of-sequence nappes of the former platform foreland. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

I use a two-country dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model with a nonzero steady-state inflation to study monetary policy in transition economies. In particular, my analysis focuses on whether inflation targeting is based on a consumer price index (CPI) or its producer counterpart, producer price index (PPI). This issue is specifically relevant for transition economies as they might be subject to Balassa–Samuelson effects arising from trading in international markets. Under these circumstances, domestic inflation is possibly higher than imported inflation, hence targeting PPI inflation may prove more effective in influencing domestic macroeconomic variables than targeting CPI inflation. Using a Bayesian methodology, I find that the central banks of three Eastern European countries (namely, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland) are likely to target PPI inflation rather than CPI inflation. This result is in line with the theoretical predictions in the literature, and is robust across several Taylor-type rules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do countries move from public to private financing of healthcare? This paper explores this issue by looking at the divergent reform trajectories of three postcommunist countries — the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. While existing accounts emphasize veto points to explain changes in healthcare systems, the present analysis finds that moves towards private financing can be better explained by differences in access to the policymaking arm of the state. Specifically, a penetrable single-party government and weak bureaucratic capacities allow physicians to capture the reform process and implement their preferred policies. The results suggest that scholars of health policy should focus more attention on the actors seeking change and their access to policy makers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes issue with arguments emanating from the global social policy literature that neoliberal policy agendas have been largely a consequence of the interplay of international agencies with indigenous reform interests. While relevant, such arguments grasp only part of the story of social policy change. By means of a case study of Hungary between 1990 and 2002, this article emphasises the role played by the bureaucratic reconstitution of the state and changing forms of national economic governance in the explanation of social policy change. We show how the bureaucratic redesign of the Hungarian state generated a 'finance-driven' form of economic governance with the state bureaucracy reconfigured around the fiscal control of the Finance Ministry. These changes had significant implications, not simply for social expenditure, but for the intellectual nature and bureaucratic space for social policy-making. Whereas critiques of neoliberal social policy reform tend to focus on the ideological nature of the projects, this analysis highlights the need to develop visions of, and arguments for, an alternative to the finance-driven forms of economic governance that have become the defacto bureaucratic archetype for re-designing welfare states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents Belarusians mainly through the eyes of tsarist administrators, both at the local level and in St. Petersburg. As a corrective to this obviously biased view, it provides statistics on Belarusians in the Russian Empire. To be sure, the accuracy of these statistics may be questioned but on the whole critics at the time and later agree that the census was carried out in a professional and unbiased manner. In any case, these statistics give us another perspective on the "Belarusian question" debated by tsarist officials. The rest of the paper is divided into three parts. First general attitudes and tropes used by Russian officials to describe the Belarusians themselves and Russian policy toward them are examined. Second, the troubling issue of Catholic Belarusians and their belonging among Russians will be taken up. Finally the related issue of "saving Belarusians from Polonism" is considered. The analysis of these various aspects of official Russia's perception of the Belarusians leads to the conclusion that throughout this period the Belarusians were not given particular attention by St. Petersburg, nearly always being overshadowed by the more pressing Jewish and Polish questions. In the half-century between the last Polish Insurrection and the outbreak of World War I, official Russian perceptions of Belarusians changed only slightly.

To improve the validity of our comparative endeavors in ethno-politics, this piece re-examines the relationship between conceptual definitions, categories of classification used in large-N datasets, and thick description found through case studies. It does this through the lens of claims to autonomy by ethnic minorities, and in particular through a detailed comparative case study of what autonomy means as a programmatic goal for ethnic minority Hungarian elites in Romania and Slovakia. Three unexpected findings emerge which make the case for qualitative research to better inform the categories and variables used in large-N datasets (1) there is a weak relationship between the conceptual definitions of autonomy and the way it is coded in relevant datasets like the Minorities at Risk (MAR) dataset; (2) empirically, the Hungarian comparative case studies show that elites do not think of autonomy in the same way as the conceptual literature nor do their understandings of autonomy easily fit into the coding categories of datasets; (3) there is inconsistency across Hungarian minority elites in their own definitions of autonomy as well as the lack of distinctions between autonomy and other institutional arrangements. This raises issues of equivalence and ambiguity and I conclude with suggestions for better measurement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In our research, we examined the discursive framing of Trianon and the Holocaust in today's Hungarian online media. Our corpus contained 26,519 articles connected to these two historical events published between September 2017 and September 2020. We used a mixed-method approach by combining computational text analysis, namely, LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) topic models and qualitative methods. Our aim was not only to map the latent thematic structure and the discourses about Trianon and the Holocaust but also to identify the main differences in the rhetoric of the different sides of the political spectrum. Using Bull and Hansen's categories, we found that the far-right and government media use the antagonistic, while the left-liberal media use the cosmopolitan mode of remembering. We identified many discursive differences between the rhetoric of the different political sides. Yet, the different relationship to emotions has the most far-reaching consequences. On the one hand, in antagonistic remembering, thus in the far-right and progovernment media, emotions play an essential role. On the other hand, cosmopolitan remembering, thus the rhetoric featured in the nongovernment media, detaches itself from emotions. This difference contributes significantly to the success of antagonistic remembering in Hungary. At the same time, the left-liberal side loses the opportunity to shape memory and identity politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on one section of the former Iron Curtain between Hungary and Austria that incorporates diverse memory events after the political change in 1989. The article concentrates on the Hungarian region during the last nearly three decades and investigates the actors and the memories of the former historic period, which show a uniquely diverse set of realizations. Among others, two private museums about the Iron Curtain (established and managed by two former border guards) and a memorial park (commemorating only one day, established and managed by a civil organization) in comparison to the official narrative presented in the last room of the permanent exhibition at the Hungarian National Museum in the capital are subjects of this investigation. Besides the actual memory places and the actors (those who initiated, maintain, and visit these memory spots), their relationship and role in the formation of the regional identity are also analyzed. As theoretical background, the connection between heritage, museum, and memory; the notion of post-Soviet nostalgia; authenticity; and the importance of time are activated for the analysis and to disentangle the complexity of the chosen case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Growing fiscal challenges and ageing populations have made pension reform a pressing issue. Two particularly salient areas of pension reform have been: raising the retirement age; and structural reforms like the adoption and reversal of pension privatisation. The authors compare two very similar cases: Russia and Hungary in the post-communist period. Both countries faced growing demographic and fiscal challenges prompting pension reform, but at the time of reform Hungary was democratic and Russia was authoritarian. Some scholars predicted that authoritarian governments would be better able than democratic ones at enacting unpopular, but arguably necessary, economic reforms. Others argue that democratic governments can more easily enact policy changes because of greater confidence about public opinion. Additionally, authoritarian policymaking can be uniquely slowed by bureaucratic in-fighting. The authors find support for the position that democratic governments can be more flexible: thus offering important insight into how regime type shapes policymaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the early 2000s governments in Russia, Poland and Hungary declared demographic crises and adopted pro-natalist programmes to increase fertility, as well as policies to support families with children. Our article compares their 'flagship' pro-natalist programmes: Russia's Maternity Capital, Poland's Family 500+, and Hungary's enhanced earned income tax credit, all framed by governments' neo-familialist discourses. We confirm these policies had limited impacts on fertility, finding that their most significant and disparate effects were instead on childhood poverty. Provision of preschool public childcare and parental leaves with levels of mothers' employment across the cases were compared. We find no relationship between coverage of childcare institutions and employment rates of mothers with young children. Data show a weak relationship between length and compensation for parental leaves and maternal employment. We conclude that post-communist governments' flagship pro-natalist incentives, family policies and traditionalist rhetoric have had limited effects in reversing demographic decline or in re-traditionalising contemporary women's lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article constitutes a critique of abstraction as an analytic tool. The argument advances the idea that formalizing practices are indexical; that is, the way abstractions are realized necessarily incorporates features of the context in which they are produced. The expression formalizing practices refers to a series of actions or operations that make quantification, rationalization, and standardization possible. Entailed in all these procedures is an attempt to select and isolate features that exemplify a specific phenomenon or social process, or in the case of standardization, that stipulate its contours and dimensions. These features are presumed to be immanent from the start, but in fact, formal representations are carefully crafted, finely tuned instruments. In order to clarify these practices, I delineate three phases of their construction: the conceptual phrase, the choice of analytic strategy, and the specification of its formal representation. In other words, this approach suggests the value of examining formalizing projects as crucibles where cultural assumptions and practical reasoning are condensed into formulae. These ideas are explored in relation to the use of time and motion studies employed in early socialist Hungary to determine the new socialist wage system. While a decidedly local story, the implications of the analysis are much broader. The possibility of adopting this approach to the study of other formalizing practices, such as algorithmic systems and digital databases, is suggested. The analysis also raises questions about the commensurability of long-held concepts in social theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To what extent can civil rights NGOs protect ethnic minorities against unequal treatment? We study this question by combining an audit experiment of 1260 local governments in Hungary with an intervention conducted in collaboration with a major Hungarian civil rights NGO. In the audit experiment we demonstrated that Roma individuals were about 13 percent-points less likely to receive responses to information requests from local governments, and the responses they received were of substantially lower quality. The intervention that reminded a random subset of local governments of their legal responsibility of equal treatment led to a short-term reduction in their discriminatory behavior, but the effects of the intervention dissipated within a month. These findings suggest that civil rights NGOs might face substantive difficulties in trying to reduce discrimination through simple information campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the secular changes in the body development patterns of Hungarian children between the 1910s and the beginning of the 2000s in relation to socioeconomic and demographic changes in the country. Individual growth data of children were available from two national growth studies (1983-86, 2003-06), while sample-size weighted means of children's body dimensions were collected through regional studies between the 1920s and 1970s. Gross domestic product, Gini index, life expectancy at birth and under-5 mortality rate were used to assess the changes in economic status, income inequalities of the society and the population's general health status, respectively. Secular changes in food consumption habits were also examined. The positive Hungarian secular changes in socioeconomic status were associated with a continuous increase in children's body dimensions. The negative socioeconomic changes reflected only in wartime and post-war periods of children's growth, and the considerable socioeconomic changes at the beginning of the 1990s did not appear to influence the positive trend in children's growth. The positive secular trend in stature and body mass did not level off at the beginning of the 2000s: the socioeconomic conditions that support optimal growth and maturation could improve in Hungary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the international genre of "retro" and how it is used in Hungary to re-matter the nation's modern past, repositioning the country within a twentieth-century European history where it was never cut off by an "Iron Curtain" from the modern West. It does this by selecting for modern consumer goods and popular culture from both East and West that fit international criteria for retro. For both young and old, retro "matters" the past in a way that affirms contemporary market sensibilities, infusing it with value through assertions of market equivalence in the past and new value as commodities in the present. If Hungarian Retro works as a form of nostalgia for some, it is for an era of perceived national prestige, value, and economic sovereignty relative to the demoralized present. While distinct from right-wing nationalist politics, Hungarian Retro nonetheless shares in the project of erasing a stigmatized state socialism from national history. This article builds on scholarship on the role of the material in producing the nation in everyday life. It contributes a perspective that brings together: (a) the domestication of international commercial and popular trends; (b) the global hierarchy of prestige based on national exports and imports; and (c) the constitution of value in citizens via the qualities of consumer goods both produced and consumed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis of public policy agendas in comparative politics has been somewhat limited in terms of geography, time frame and political system, with studies on full-blown autocracies and hybrid regimes few and far between. This article addresses this gap by comparing policy dynamics in three Hungarian regimes over 73 years. Besides our theoretical contribution related to policy-making in Socialist autocracy and illiberal democracy, we also test hypotheses related to non-democratic regimes. We find that – similarly to developed democracies – policy agendas in autocracies are mostly stable with occasional but large-scale "punctuations". Our data also confirms that these punctuations are more pronounced in non-democratic polities. However, based on our results, illiberal political systems, such as the hybrid regime of Viktor Orbán, are difficult to pin down on such a clear-cut continuum between democracy and autocracy as the level of punctuation differs by policy agendas from parliamentary debates to budgets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at the careers of two school-founding Hungarian historians and university professors, the reconstruction, interpretation and comparison of their perceptions of history, their views on the role of the historiographer, and their opinions on the history of Jews in Hungary. Since both openly professed to be Hungarian Jews, I also try to find out what that meant for them. My interpretive frame follows the 'speech-act' approach of the Cambridge contextual school of the history of ideas, the description of notions of meaning/attribution of meaning, and the 'drama triangle' (the identification of the traumatized roles of the victim, persecutor and rescuer) in the literature of trauma elaboration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the contribution of European political parties to democratic backsliding. It focuses on the European People's Party's efforts to protect the Hungarian government, and the European Conservatives and Reformists party's permissive acceptance of the Polish government's attacks on democracy and the rule of law, analysing these patterns of behaviour as a form of complicity in democratic backsliding. In a second step, the article examines the existing possibilities and normative justification for sanctioning European political parties that make a complicit contribution to democratic backsliding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: The aim of this study is to give a broad overview of the international best practices regarding the implementation of point-of-care testing (POCT) in primary care (PC) setting and to highlight the facilitators and barriers for widespread national uptake. The study focuses on the managerial and organizational side of POCT, offering a roadmap for implementation as well as highlighting the most important requirements needed to unlock the clinical and economical potential of POCT in the Hungarian healthcare system. Methods: We conducted an English language scoping literature review between January 2012 and June 2021 to assess the recent trends of POCT implementation in developed countries. Our research focuses on the recent publications of several European and Anglo-Saxon countries where POCT utilization is common. In parallel, we reviewed the Hungarian regulatory framework, ongoing governmental legislation, and strategies influencing the POCT dissemination in the Hungarian PC sector. Results: Among the possible POCT usage in PC, we identified several clinically relevant devices and tests (C-reactive protein, urine, blood glucose, D-dimer, prothrombin time) important in screening and early detection of morbidities representing high disease burden. Based on international literature, general practitioners (GPs) are interested in the shortened diagnostic times, portable devices, and better doctor–patient relations made possible by POCT. There are several concerns, however, regarding initial and operational costs and reimbursement, limited scientific evidence about quality and safety, unclear regulations on quality validation of tests, as well as managerial aspects like PC staff training and IT integration at the GP level. Conclusion: As our review highlights, there is considerable interest among GPs to implement POCT as it has the potential to improve quality of care; however, there are many obstacles to overcome before widespread uptake. Further investigation is recommended to elaborate management and quality insurance background and to develop appropriate regulatory framework and financial scheme for GP practices. Preferably this work should involve the local practicing GPs to better tailor the implementation roadmap to country-specific details. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I discuss the emancipation of masturbation in twentieth-century Hungary, focusing on the socialist, Kádár era (late 1950s to late 1980s), which I claim was the time when the discourses concerning masturbation underwent profound transformation. I use Thomas Laqueur's periodization of discourses on masturbation in the West and make the case that in Hungary, due to its twentieth-century political and intellectual history, which affected both the institutionalization of sexology and discourses on sexuality, there is a markedly different chronology. In Hungary, interwar socialists were the first to suggest a new approach toward masturbation but these ideas remained marginal during the Horthy regime and in the 'Stalinist' 1950s. In the early years of the Kádár regime, debates about sexual morality reformulated what should be understood under socialist sexual morality. The concept of socialist humanism, especially Imre Hirschler's work, linked early 1960s sex education with the interwar socialist discourse on sex and paved the way to the emancipation of masturbation and the establishment of a post-Stalinist, socialist sexual ethics. In the 1970s and 1980s, iconic sexologists like Vilmos Szilágyi and Béla Buda moved away from socialist humanism and continued Hirschler's work, but mirroring the perspectives of contemporary Western science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ecological network of Natura 2000, an European Union (EU) initiative to halt biodiversity loss across Europe, has dominated biodiversity governance in the new EU member states in recent years, as implementation was a condition of accession. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have generally assisted Natura 2000 implementation. In two Central and Eastern European countries (Poland and Hungary), NGOs became involved in different ways; this paper seeks to analyse and explain these national differences by researching the theoretical background of policy networks and advocacy coalitions in both countries. In Hungary, NGOs worked closely with governmental authorities and contributed significantly to site selection. In Poland, NGOs initially opposed government plans, but later moved toward close cooperation with public institutions; this resulted in a significant expansion in the area and number of designated Natura 2000 sites. In both countries, NGO influence increased during the Natura 2000 process owing to the establishment of multi-level policy networks with the European Commission and public institutions, based on resource dependencies and shared beliefs. In post-socialist countries, the progression from government-monopolized biodiversity conservation implies a growing importance and contribution of NGOs, and their ability to use resources appropriately in the new governance contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The international controversy concerning the Hungarian ‘status law’ of 2001 attests to the vital importance of ethnic minority rights in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as within an enlarged European Union. The paper examines the unique challenges raised by the law from its initial adoption in June 2001 to its subsequent amendment in June 2003. It looks at the interaction between four principal kinds of actors: Hungary (a kin state legislating support for ethnic co- nationals in neighbouring countries), Romania and Slovakia (home states to sizeable Hungarian ethnic groups), the Hungarian minorities in Romania and Slovakia, and the European institutions that became involved in the dispute as mediators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this Article, I suggest considering linkages of a theoretical, and continuities of a sociological nature between on the one hand, the concept and the practical use of socialist legality in Socialist Hungary—with particular regard to the period following the judicial reform of 1954—and on the other hand, the concept of constitutional identity as it has developed in the Fundamental Law in Hungary, with particular regard to the period since the 2011 judicial reform. The Article highlights surprising similarities in the politically determined legislative intention in these two periods to form embracing, quasi legal concepts, which in themselves seem to differ fundamentally, although the similarities in their nature and in the specific constitutional practice are attention-grabbing. The interpretation of the role of state institutions, and especially the judicial role, lead one to think that despite the explicit rejection of the Socialist era in Article U) of the Fundamental Law in Hungary, the new constitutional regime has familiar attitudes to the understanding of the rule of law and the role of the judiciary in promoting the enforcement of the new, supra legal concepts of a transformative nature, which, however, are filled in with the ruling political ideology, whether it be socialist legality or national constitutional identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study seeks to answer the question of whether there are similarities between the methods used to limit judicial independence in Hungary during the last phase of the communist regime, i.e. before the democratic transition, and today, when many scholars believe that an authoritarian transition is taking place in this country. For this purpose, I argue that despite the undeniable fundamental differences between the political and legal system of these two periods, the mechanisms and ways as the independence of judiciary were and are influenced by the government can plausibly be compared. The analysis seems to support this presumption: both the formal instruments and the informal channels of influence in the hands of the ruling political forces show a number of similarities. Thus, even if there are differences in the degree of their application and result, from centralizing the system of judicial administration to replacing court leaders with politically loyal people there are a number of instruments that enable central government to influence the judiciary, while maintaining the appearance of judicial independence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers an opening to Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) situation and attacks against the judiciary in this region since 2010. The focus is not primarily on historical path dependence like the rest of this issue. Instead, the focus aims at the nature of attacks on the judiciary. Such attacks have appeared in CEE and the US in recent years. Its interest lies in explaining similar patterns visible in the judiciaries of CEE. Particularly, it looks at the current conditions in the Czech judiciary, political interventions in Poland since 2015 and in Hungary since 2010, and undermining of trust towards judiciary in the U.S., where attempts for delegitimizing the judiciary have happened since 2016. The article draws on similarities of attacks of authoritarian governments and responses of judiciaries. The authors highlight similarities and diversities of CEE countries 30 years after the fall of the communist regime and a path of these resemblances and varieties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mass media research on the portrayal of older people has primarily focused on television series and advertisements. News programmes on television have received little attention. We argue that viewers perceive characters on the news as more direct and more accurate representations of social reality than fictional characters, and therefore portrayals on the news are more likely to be integrated in viewers' stereotypes about elderly people or used as standards of comparison. In order to explore potential differences in the representation of senior men and women, we conducted a quantitative content analysis on a sample of 754 elderly people who appeared on the evening news programmes of four major Hungarian television channels with high viewership. Each character was coded in terms of 115 qualitative variables. Our results indicate that older men are portrayed significantly more often than women as affluent, elegant, knowledgeable, powerful and actively working. By contrast, women are more commonly shown as kind, family-oriented, in ordinary roles (e.g. as the 'woman in the street') and engaged in less-productive activities such as shopping. Based on previous research on the role of mass media in the socialisation process as well as social comparison theory, we discuss how these imbalances in the representation of older men and women may affect viewers of different age groups, genders and social status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The maintenance of protected lichen species and their biodiversity in general depends on good management practices based on their distribution and habitat preferences. To date, 10 of the 17 protected lichen species of Hungary have been recorded in the Bakony Mts including the Balaton Uplands region. Habitat preferences of three protected Cladonia species (C. arbuscula, C. mitis and C. rangiferina) growing on underlying rocks of red sandstone, basalt, Pannonian sandstone and gravel were investigated by detailed sampling. We recorded aspect, underlying rock type, soil depth, pH and CaCO3 content, habitat type (as defined by the General National Habitat Classification System Á-NÉR), all species of lichen, bryophyte and vascular plants as well as percentage cover of exposed rock, total bryophytes, lichens, vascular plants and canopy, degree of disturbance and animal impacts. Sporadic populations of these species mostly exist at the top of hills and mountains in open acidofrequent oak forests, but they may occur in other habitats, such as closed acidofrequent oak forests, slope steppes on stony soils, siliceous open rocky grasslands, open sand steppes, wet and mesic pioneer scrub and dry Calluna heaths. Cladonia rangiferina was found to grow beneath higher canopy cover than either C. arbuscula or C. mitis in the Balaton Uplands. Furthermore, there were significant differences in canopy cover between occupied and unoccupied quadrats in the case of all three species. Cladonia rangiferina is a good indicator species of natural habitats in Hungary due to its restricted distribution and low ecological tolerance. These results may lead to the adoption of effective conservation methods (e.g. game exclusion, artificial dispersal) in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using Hungary as a case study and focusing on legislative policies and the practical application of hate crime legislation, this article shows the various ways legal policy can become misguided in the labyrinth of identity politics, minority protection, and penal populism. The first mistake states can make, the author argues, is not to adopt hate crime legislation. The second error arguably pertains to conceptualizing hate crimes as an identity protection but not a minority-protection mechanism and instrument. The third fallacy the author identifies concerns legislative and practical policies that conceptualize victims based on self-identification and not on the perpetrator's (or the wider community's) potential perception and classification. The fourth flaw concerns the abuse of the concept of hate crime when it is applied in interethnic conflicts wherein members of minority communities are perpetrators and the victims are members of the majority communities. The fifth is institutional discrimination through the systematic underpolicing of hate crimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In democracies, majority-rule voting is an esteemed rule for collective decisions, but its hazards have recently become apparent after a series of controversial referendums and ascendant populist leaders. Here, we investigate people's judgments about when voting is appropriate for collective decisions across five countries with diverse cultures and political institutions (Denmark, Hungary, India, Russia, and USA). Participants read scenarios in which individuals with conflicting preferences need to make a collective decision. They judged whether the group should decide by voting, consensus, leadership, or chance. We experimentally manipulated whether the group contains a vulnerable minority – a smaller number of people with more at stake than the majority. In all five countries, participants generally preferred voting without a vulnerable minority, with relatively greater support for voting in more democratic countries. But, when the group included a vulnerable minority, participants in all countries reduced their support for voting and instead preferred consensus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 13 March 2020 the Hungarian Government announced the immediate closure of all schools throughout the country to prevent the spread of COVID-19 forcing several hundred thousand children to learn from home, and teachers to ensure their education. The Hungarian Educational Authority hurried to issue recommendations on the use of digital education tools. During the COVID-19 pandemic and the special legal order consequently introduced by the Hungarian Government, Hungary has seen the emergence of such non-binding measures adopted by public entities, complementing governmental action against the pandemic, with the aim of providing guidance to bodies exercising a public service function ("addressees"). These protective measures adopted under the special legal order are deemed to be successful and are largely followed by the addressees. Since soft law has hitherto been neglected by both Hungarian administrative governance and the legal literature, the recent burgeoning of non-binding measures deserves scholarly attention. In this article, we set out to map the specific context of the emergence of domestic soft law and the conditions for its adoption and reception, relying on our case study conducted in respect of the National Educational Authority's recommendations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Transdanubian Range, Pannonian Basin, Hungary, karstic sinkholes on a planation surface of Triassic carbonates are filled by grey clayey–silty kaolin deposits. The provenance and accumulation age of these strongly altered terrestrial karst-filling sediments are constrained by X-ray powder diffraction, heavy mineral analysis and zircon U–Pb dating. The heavy minerals of the Southern Bakony Mountains samples are dominated by the ultra-stable zircon–rutile–tourmaline association. Zircon U–Pb data indicate accumulation between 20 and 16 Ma. Furthermore, Archaean to Palaeogene grains were also determined, reflecting the principally fluvial recycling of Eocene bauxites and their cover sequences. In contrast, the sample from the Keszthely Hills consists almost exclusively of airborne material including zircons of 18–14 Ma, reflecting a dominant contribution from the Carpathian–Pannonian Neogene volcanism. The shift in the Miocene age components is inferred to have been caused by the landscape evolution and burial history of the planation surface remnants controlled by local block tectonics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What were the main characteristics of turn-of-the-twentieth-century Hungarian collective identity and memory political debates? They were no longer determined by the discourse of liberal-rights-extending assimilation, yet public speech was also not entirely determined by the ethnicist–essentialist subject matter of the interwar national characterology discourse; rather, the internal dilemma of the rights-extending assimilation was externalized. There were some who sought to advance the extension of rights in the direction of suffrage. Others held on to rights extension in the hope of assimilation and believed they could promote it through establishing institutions of public education. Others abided by rights-extending assimilation, but interpreted it in terms of individual cultural achievements. Yet others believed that their fears of historical Hungary falling apart and the decay of the national middle class could be counterbalanced by curtailing or revoking nationalities' rights and exclusionary policies against them. This article focuses on four different types of forging a collective identity: programmes, master narratives, political languages, strategies and regimes of memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to make the contemporary Hungarian jazz field the focus of a sociological investigation, based on a critical reinterpretation of Bourdieu's relational theory of artistic fields. It aims to grasp the logic of symbolic distinctions by analysing the free/mainstream dichotomy. This dichotomy of historically constituted poles is understood as a system of structuring oppositions that play a decisive role in the position-takings and prestige-construction of jazz musicians. The analysis of qualitative data shows how different evaluations and interpretations of shared musical references are instrumentalised in order to occupy positions in the field. Further, this article argues that such a qualitative analysis of local jazz fields transcends the national context, since culturally hybrid jazz diasporas offer an excellent terrain for analysing how the circulation of transnational artistic references influences the cultural dynamism of local fields that are embedded within global networks of cultural production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information about the conference honoring the 200th death anniversary of composer Joseph Haydn held in Hungary from May 27 to 30 of 2009 is presented. Topics include operatic reform, Jewish tropes, and insertion fragments. The conference featured several speakers including Elaine Sisman of Columbia University, Caryl Clark of the University of Toronto, and James Webster of Cornell University.