Abstract (may include machine translation)
This chapter distinguishes between four main periods in the history of electoral research in Hungary. Until 1990 Hungary only had brief encounters with competitive mass democracy, and consequently scholarly examinations of elections were sporadic. An impressive amount of survey data were collected in the run-up to first parliamentary elections of the postcommunist era in March-April 1990. Although the scholarly publications of the period had very little direct relationship with the main themes and approaches in Western studies of electoral behaviour, they touched upon - or rediscovered - several exciting theoretical issues. An arguably less interesting period followed after the 1990 election. Commercial political polling became strongly institutionalized and routinized, but the numerous academic research projects developed in isolation from each other and rarely generated more than descriptive, atheoretical analyses, with little cummulative content. A more promising era has started around the second parliamentary election in 1994, with an increasing scholarly exchange between practicioners, and - since 1996, at least - an obvious awareness of the need to put all findings in the perspective of permanent changes on the party scene, instead of automatically treating them as constants of the post-1990 period. However, apart from a shared understanding of the main socio-demographic correlates of party choice, a commonly agreed upon set of findings is yet to appear in the domestic literature. Summarizing the idiosyncratic findings of a large number of studies talking past each other would certainly go beyond the limits of this chapter. Instead, an overview is offered about how, in my view, some of the common failings in this field could be overcome.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Elections in Central and Eastern Europe: the first wave |
Editors | Hans-Dieter Klingemann, Ekkehard Mochmann, Kenneth Newton |
Place of Publication | Berlin |
Publisher | Edition Sigma |
Pages | 71-104 |
Number of pages | 34 |
ISBN (Print) | 3894041951 |
State | Published - 2000 |