Suchergebnisse

This article sets out a conceptual basis for measuring Vojvodina's regional autonomy in Serbia's European perspective. Serbia is a potential candidate country for EU accession, implementation of the European Partnership (2008) will be examined through the mechanisms established under the stabilization and association process. In 2009, the Serbian Parliament ratified the new autonomy statute for Vojvodina. While the national government could not entirely close its eyes to the EU regionalization requirements the provincial government had the opportunity to express its demands. The Statute of Vojvodina was to set out the key principles that should underlie effective regional democracy, covering areas such as financial autonomy and legislative powers. Parallel with regional autonomy one sees the challenges of personal autonomy and Hungarian National Council in the sphere of freedoms relating to language, education and cross-border cooperation. The article concludes by examining measures of Hungary's national policy towards capacities of AP Vojvodina, aiming at faster integration of Serbia, and Hungarian minority communities living in the border area.

As a motivational factor of action, political efficacy is an important predictor of political behaviour. The term was invented to capture the extent to which people feel that they can effectively participate in politics and shape political processes. Today, we have a comprehensive knowledge of the individual-level factors (socio-demographic variables, political preferences etc.) that shape the level of internal and external dimensions of political efficacy. However, while it is widely demonstrated that media consumption influences the level of political efficacy, the country-level media context factors affecting it have rarely been studied. This paper reports the findings of extensive research on how two crucial features of the media context, the political significance of the media and the level of political parallelism in the media system, shape the level of external and internal political efficacy. The investigation draws upon the dataset of the seventh round (2014 – 2015) of the European Social Survey (ESS) and includes more than twenty-two thousand respondents from nineteen European democracies. The research hypothesizes that in countries where the media play a more important role, people have lower levels of external and higher levels of internal political efficacy. Political parallelism, which shows the extent to which media outlets are driven by distinct political orientations and interests within a particular media system, is expected to directly increase both external and internal political efficacy. Its indirect effect is also hypothesized, arguing that partisan media amplifies the winner-loser gap in political efficacy as a kind of "echo chamber". The findings show that in countries where the media play a major role in shaping political discourse, people have lower levels of external political efficacy, while the political parallelism of the media system indirectly affects the external dimensions of political efficacy. Internal political efficacy is, however, not related to these context-level factors.