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During the early Cold War, it was difficult for American intelligence to penetrate the Iron Curtain but a potential solution soon arose: émigré intelligence groups such as the Magyar Harcosok Bajtársi Közössége (MHBK) or 'Association of Hungarian Veterans'. This group, however, turned out to be an intelligence 'paper mill'. Attempts at trans-Atlantic cooperation with the MHBK and similar groups failed as they lost most of their good sources and were penetrated by communist security services. By the mid-1950s, US intelligence cut these groups off, took over their good sources, and established a source registry to prevent recurrence of the problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most research on post-socialist civil society has focused on analysing the characteristics that explain (the lack of) civic strength. Although recent research has highlighted the rise of urban activism, it has failed to look more closely at the agency of actors. By focusing on informal groups and their engagement in public affairs in the aftermath of the 2019 local elections in Hungary, this paper seeks to unravel the civic strategies and narratives that underpin informal civic resistance to political and institutional pressures at a time when both local municipalities and civil society are experiencing a gradual loss of autonomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper focuses on how illiberal politics in post-2010 Hungary have affected the political opportunities of advocacy groups in terms of influencing policymaking and how the latter have adapted their strategies to this challenge. Based on a series of interviews conducted with the representatives of advocacy groups as well as members of the central administration, the paper investigates the changing patterns of policy advocacy in three arenas: the venues of social dialogue, the arena of direct lobbying, and that of activism. The expectation of the research was that the undermining of social dialogue by the government would spur advocacy groups to relocate their activities into direct lobbying and activism. However, the general picture is of a decline in advocacy activity. A decade of illiberal politics has changed not only the political and institutional environment of advocacy groups but also the general social context. Faced with these challenges, Hungarian advocacy groups have not been able to come up with strategic innovations which would have redefined their objectives and means. As a theoretical contribution, the paper suggests that the concept of political opportunities should be broadened in order to account for the deep social transformations that are brought about by illiberal politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the long-term trajectory and the recent acceleration of the conflict over the rule of law in the EU. It focusses on the motivation of the two governments in Hungary and Poland to challenge European core values increasingly aggressively even directly at EU level despite the threat of significant material costs to both countries. Putting forward a Gramscian understanding, we argue that this radicalization is the result of a counter-hegemonic strategy that aims at replacing the liberal order with a new, nationalist, ultraconservative, Christian order on domestic and European levels. The paper traces core elements of this strategy which are either disputed or underestimated in existing literature, most importantly the pursuit of a core ideology and the massive and long-term investment into winning moral and cultural leadership through the penetration of civil society which precedes and complements electoral strategies and autocratic institution building. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper deals with the practice of the Hungarian Constitutional Court regarding the restrictions of fundamental rights during the state of danger between 2020 and 2023. The state of danger – which is a type of special legal order in Hungary – was first introduced in March 2020 due to Covid-19. The rules of the Fundamental Law related to the special legal order reserve the Government the opportunity of broader restrictions on certain fundamental rights than in a normal legal order. It was the first period when the Constitutional Court could have established its practice and defined its own role in a special legal order, since the democratic transition in Hungary. The need for the interpretation of the constitutional rules on special legal order never applied before has posed a significant challenge to the Constitutional Court. The paper first examines the development of the constitutional rules on special legal order situations since the democratic transition, then reviews the most important parts of the Constitutional Court's practice on the cases related to the restrictions of fundamental rights in special legal order with a focus on the elements of the test used for checking the constitutionality of the challenged items of legislation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article fills a gap in the international academic literature, which has little to say on agricultural labour in Central and Eastern European countries and especially Hungary. The paper reveals factors that determine the ethnicisation and problematic availability of seasonal agricultural labourers in Hungary, made up mainly, but not exclusively of people of Roma ethnicity, largely Ukrainian or Romanian citizens from Hungarian minorities in Trans-Carpathia or Transylvania. The flexible oscillation of low-skilled labour across different economic sectors explains why a shortage peaked between 2016 and 2019 when, in addition to agriculture, the local states (through public works programmes) and industry (as post-crisis growth returned) competed for the same labour. The paper discusses findings from qualitative research, undertaken in an inner peripheral rural region, portraying the strategies and practices of local fruit-growing farmers to obtain labour, as well as diversify and mechanise. The study illustrates the mutual dependency of farmers and the local manual workforce. It is likely, however, that this mutuality will not last long: differentiation in farm structure will continue, some small orchards will disappear, large ones will become stronger and larger, and in doing so will not be able to avoid opting for migrant labour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to decide whether or not term premiums appear and thus are predictable in Central European countries in the data sample of forward rate agreement interest rates and corresponding spot interest rates. Term premiums theoretically are explained thanks to the applications of the efficient market hypothesis theory, the expectations theory, and the liquidity preferences theory. Empirically, we used cointegration techniques for nonstationary time series, mainly using the cointegration method (simple and even for panel data) and the vector error correction model. We used data samples of Central European countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland) and also of the United Kingdom. We found that the best future estimate of term premiums is its current value. It does not refer in the same way to the market efficiency hypothesis (EMH) or theexpectations hypothesis (EH). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The late 19th and early 20th centuries were a period when artistic endeavours, aimed at expressing a national identity, were thriving in Hungary. The Jewish minority of Budapest also found it important to be present in public spaces. A couple of years after the emancipation of Hungarian Jews, the first statues of Jewish personalities appeared on the streets of Budapest. Who were these statues dedicated to? Who were the artists commissioned, and who paid for them? What were the invisible texts beyond reading the statues as texts? What happened to the public monuments during the Second World War? This paper aims to respond to these questions as a part of a research project mapping Jewish interventions in public art in Budapest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research has suggested a decline in alcohol use among students, however, only a few papers offer to explain why adolescents are drinking less. According to ESPAD, adolescents' alcohol use is decreasing in Europe, but only Hungary shows an increasing trend. The paper aims to give explanation for the opposite trends. The analysis is based on a cross-national dataset, ESPAD in 2003 and 2019, involving 25 countries (N = 157,790). The background variables cover family, school, leisure time, risk behaviors. Chi-square tests, logit explanatory model, KHB method were applied. In Hungary and in countries with decline the strongest relation with current alcohol use was found for internet use, going out, parental control, daily smoking, and alcohol intake. In countries with decline and in Hungary, stronger parental control, going out less often, smoking less may contribute to a declining trend while a more widespread internet use may contribute to an increasing trend. Hungary shows the same pattern as the countries with decline, so other factors such as a lack of alcohol policy, permissive attitudes, media representation, health awareness may be behind the different trends. Future research should be directed toward providing further explanations for the opposite trends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

European governments have become more active in economic affairs since the great financial crisis of 2008; the Covid-19 epidemic and Russia's war in Ukraine have triggered a variety of government interventions. What is less obvious is the increased non-customary state activism in the form of 'patriotic economic policy' in EU periphery, particularly in Hungary, in and out of crisis times. The successive Hungarian governments under PMV. Orbán have systematically eroded checks and balances in order to enlarge their room of manoeuvre while practicing a self-styled illiberal, pro-sovereignty policy. The paper revisits the earlier development phases of the Hungarian transformation, trying to identify antecedents to the later Hungarian backsliding in market competition and liberal democratic order. Aspects of state capacity, size and composition of the state sector, and key policy directions are investigated in order to make sense of the differing transformation paths in Europe's eastern periphery with a focus on Hungary, a onetime space setter in the transition process. Populism seems to be a misnomer for Orbanism which might be better understood as "cronyism with a cause": government budgetary measures are self-serving but they also attempt at rebuilding the state. The paper concludes with an overview of possibly outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether a country's innovative capacity increases when the business sector invests more in research and development. The empirical investigation covers Serbia and its three neighboring countries in the European Union - Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria - for the period from 2011 to 2021. The results indicate that an increase in investment by the business sector at the current level of GDP influences the increase in innovation in the case of Serbia, Hungary, and Bulgaria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper argues for an ideology-centred interpretation of the Orbán regime. Those regimes are considered ideology-centred that promote a particular worldview through discourse, consequential policies and the allocation of resources. In addition to demonstrating that Hungary after 2010 satisfies these criteria, I identify three principal ideological modules of the regime: illiberal conservatism, civilisationist ethnocentrism, and paternalist populism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the programming period of 2021–2027, the European Union (EU) encourages and supports cities and towns across the community to take action to enlarge their green infrastructure and develop and improve urban green spaces. As the provision of equal opportunities is a horizontal principle of the EU, the needs of vulnerable and disabled people are crucial to consider in developments. Using survey data from 102 respondents in Hungary, this paper explores and assesses blind and visually impaired people’s perceptions of urban green spaces and factors that support or hinder them from accessing and using the parks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using secondary research from the political, education, and employment fields, this paper aims to demonstrate the consequences of confused and overlapping conceptualizations of the Roma in Hungary as an ethnic group, a racialized minority, a national minority, and a socially disadvantaged group. The resulting cacophony of operationalizing schemes blurs clarity and constrains efficient measures for inclusion policies. In social sciences and law, the purpose of classification is to help us understand the internal logic of concepts. Thus, classification has significant consequences, as it can imperil policy goals. Through examining the case of the Hungarian Roma, the article demonstrates how the confused conceptualization of ethnicity, race, and nationality and ill-applied methods of operationalization have vastly detrimental consequences. In addition, it is argued that many concerns regarding ethnic data processing that policy actors voice are legally unfounded, and pre-existing data protection regimes allow the processing of ethno-racial data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper offers an analysis of future prospects of poor working persons. It pays attention to transitions from in-work poverty, focusing, in particular, on the probability of remaining at work and move above the poverty line. The analysis brings new insights into the situation in the countries in Central Europe, expanding limited knowledge on this subject. It shows that they differ in several aspects of in-work poverty and its dynamics, including the mobility of working poor as well as presence of their various trajectories. For example, while Poland stands out as the country offering most limited chances for "positive" mobility from working poverty, Hungary represents the most "open" regime, where working poor's future prospects seem to be more favorable. Findings from the empirical analysis covers the period 2012–2019, based on the pooled longitudinal dataset from the European Survey on Income and Living Conditions (EU SILC). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focuses on right-wing populists (RWP) in power and their discourses and policy preferences on environmental issues. Through a content and frame analysis of electoral manifestos, party communication and semi-structured, in-depth interviews with party representatives, this paper examines whether ideological or contextual factors (political opportunities) determine RWP positioning on the environment. By focusing on the only three cases in Europe of RWP in government in a prominent position, i.e. alone or as a major coalition partner (also representing key ideological varieties of RWP), Law and Justice – PiS in Poland; Fidesz in Hungary and Lega in Italy, this study shows that ideological positions (and especially differences) are less important in determining RWP environmental discourses than are opportunities and institutionalization. Moreover, we also find that the shared features across these actors reflect a conditional, 'yes-but' environmentalism of these parties, embedded in the discourse of ecological modernization and oppositional, Manichean framing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the past two decades, two global events highlighted the importance of household savings to economies and individuals, and their relation to economic activity and growth. First, the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 reminded the world that household savings are essential for economic recovery and sustainable economic development. Second, the recent COVID-19 pandemic showed how vulnerable household savings are to various external shocks. This paper investigates the relationship between household savings rates and real GDP in the four countries of the Visegrád Group, namely the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia, for the period 1996–2021. Our empirical analyses indicate short-run Granger causality from real GDP to household savings rates, and from household savings rates to real GDP, in both the Czech Republic and Hungary. Additionally, we also report significant long-run relationships between household savings rates and real GDP, particularly in Hungary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our paper fills the gap in research on online public representations of politically active youth by focusing on the discursive representations of Fridays for Future, a youth-led climate movement, in user generated content in Czechia and Hungary. By employing the childism approach, we aim to contribute to a better understanding of the exclusion of youth from the public sphere. Our qualitative analysis identified two exclusionary strategies: 1) normative roles attributed to youth; 2) labeling youth for allegedly holding aberrant values. We stress both similarities and differences in the two countries of Central and Eastern Europe, reflecting this region's historicopolitical features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes a proxy for issue salience via studying congruence between parties' organizational structure and the policies they promote to their voters. This charter-manifesto congruence, i.e. institutionalizing the same democratic innovations at the intra-party level and advocating for their adoption at the national level, is particularly useful to demarcate party profiles in dominant party systems and electoral autocracies. To demonstrate how such congruence can be measured, we analyse the credibility of the commitments made by opposition parties in Hungary to a variety of democratic innovations. Drawing on novel survey data, we further substantiate our argument by showing high support for these innovations among party members and voters. The analysis identifies gender quotas as the most congruent innovation. Our longitudinal research design also reveals a recent breakthrough of e-democracy in party manifestos. We then discuss how preferences for various innovations are potentially shaped by membership size, party founders' political socialization or organizational learning. At the normative level, the analysis suggests that some forms of democratic innovations are better suited for intra-party organizations than for party manifestos. These implications might be relevant for those committed to promoting deliberation, gender equality and (re-)engagement of the youth in politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The second half of the nineteenth century was an era of mass labour migration in Europe, when the Atlantic route became of paramount importance alongside intra-continental mobility. From the last third of the century Italy and Hungary were among the most important emigrating countries. By this time changes in the regulation of migration had begun to take place with the development of stronger state control, which affected mobility and the relationship between emigrants and transporters. The question also arose as to whether and how the large emigrating states could ensure the loyalty of their emigrant citizens and control them en route and in the destination states. The regulatory process which began in the 1880s gradually moved from an administrative approach to the development of more comprehensive legal sources covering more and more aspects of emigration with the Hungarian government making use of foreign solutions, particularly the Italian Emigration Act of 1901. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Basil (Ocimum basilicum L.) is an aromatic plant used in foods, pharmaceuticals, and in cosmetics. In this study, the morphology and yield of 17 different basil genotypes and three cultivars (Moonlight, Midnight, and Dino) from Türkiye were analyzed in 2019 and 2020. A wide range of variations in plant height, number of branches, and weights of fresh and dry herbs weights were observed. The genotypes PI 531,396 from Hungary, PI 174,284 from Türkiye, PI 253,157 from Iran, and the Dino cultivar had the highest plant yield compared with the other genotypes and cultivars. The leaf color parameters (L*, a*, b* C*, H° and WI) were also determined for the plants. The highest lightness (L*) values were recorded in the PI 190,100 genotype, and the highest yellowness/blueness (b*) and hue angle (H°) values were recorded in the PI 207,498 genotype. The highest redness/greenness (a*), chroma (C*), and whiteness index (WI) values were recorded in the PI 197,442, PI 190,100, and PI 531,396 genotypes, respectively. Except for the L* values, the leaf color parameters clustered on the same side of the principal component analysis (PCA) axis. Dendrogram analysis divided the genotypes and cultivars into two main groups, and the main A group contained the cultivar Dino only. Therefore, the study identified important genotypic characteristics of the examined basil genotypes and cultivars that could be utilized to develop new cultivars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how first-in-family-graduate Roma and non-Roma Hungarians from the working-class experience education-driven social mobility and reconcile the dislocation of their primary-habitus due to changing class through transiting a 'third space'. Drawing on Bhabha's and bell hooks' development of this concept, we aim to unpack the different ways how class-changers, in moving between the social milieu of their origin and their destination, occupy a unique position between two fields. Their social position is described as one of social navigators with a bridging potential between social classes. We also investigate what part higher education plays in this distinct form of changing class and becoming incorporated into middle-class society through a third space for those academic high achievers who come from working-class families. Contrasting the experience of Roma with non-Roma first-generation graduates in Hungary, we draw attention to the different opportunities of reconciling conflicting class-related habitus along ethno-racial lines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade, governing parties in Central and Eastern Europe have dismantled liberal democracy, violating the rule of law and limiting the power of judges. This article examines the opposition to these transformations, focusing on the role of judges in Poland, Hungary, and Romania. Drawing on an original survey, as well as a set of interviews with judges, the article shows that while in Poland judges have developed a unified opposition to the government in defending their independence, in Romania, in contrast, governmental measures have polarized judges into a divided opposition, while their mobilization has been rather non-existent in Hungary. Why do judges oppose governmental action limiting judicial independence in some contexts but not in others? The article shows that the nature and the sequencing of domestic transformations, coupled with ideational factors and interests-based calculations, explain judges' opposition at the collective and individual levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]