A kakukk fészke: Pártrendszer és törésvonalak Magyarországon

The paper attempts to analyse some of the assumptions behind the frequent assertion that the current Hungarian party-system is facing a gradual transformation, the inevitable end-product of which will be the location of parties along a single L-R continuum. It is argued that this deterministic view can be reconciled only with social change, but hardly with party-strategy and interest group approaches to issue and cleavage development. Hypotheses drawn from the macro-sociological and interest group approaches are tested on ISSP 1985, 1990 and 1991 and IEWSS 1991 data. The results suggest that first, the economic dimension of the L-R scheme is indeed less important in Hungarian and Polish party competition compared to Western ones; second, in Hungary the religious cleavage may be just as important as the former one in Western democracies; and third, this finding can be explained in the framework of the interest group, but not in that of the macro-sociological approach.