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...

This recent book titled From learning the language to political participation is the result of a vast research program named ‘European Integration Modules – Exchange of Experience’ carried out by the ICCR-Budapest Foundation. The aim of this initiative was to select and explore European...

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,...

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;...

Recent literature on Hungary seems to be conclusive about the fact that elite consensus has collapsed and democracy is backsliding towards autocracy because of the elites’ norm-breaking behavior (Lengyel 2014; Bozóki 2015; Kristóf 2015). It is also recognized that the governmental elite has been...

The paper considers the effects of economic globalization on the relationship between national economic and political elites. It is contended that high levels of globalization lead to the de-coupling of economic elites from national political elites and that economic globalization also...