The Impact of the Religion Issue on Electoral Preferences in Hungary 1990-1991

The present paper aims to contribute to our knowledge about the possible development of Eastern European party systems. My example is Hungary, perhaps not the most irrelevant case in this context. On the one hand, sometimes this country is considered as the one with the-relatively speaking-most stable or most'developed'party system of the region. On the other hand, both ethnic conflicts and the typical currents of the early phases of the post-communist transition, like the tensions within the non-communist camp between'moderates' advocating cooperation with the reform-communists and'radicals' urging the acceleration of the transition, etc. which tend to overshadow the conflicts of the future are already largely or completely missing from the Hungarian political scene. Obviously, one can not generalize from one case, not even for the countries belonging to Western Christianity.