Suchergebnisse

It is a widely used assumption in the literature on political decision-making that leaders 'choose their battles' according to their interests. This strategic approach often results in seemingly 'fake crises'; crises which are – as opposed to natural disasters – not exogenous in nature. These crises are exceptional in that they are avoidable and are the product of political entrepreneurs following deliberate agendas. In this paper, the logic of crisis manufacturing is illustrated by a case study of the 'fiscal wars' of 2011–2013. The case study shows how, given the right institutional environment, political entrepreneurs, even those outside the political mainstream, can use crisis manufacturing to their advantage. In order to exploit the institutional veto points related to fiscal policy in the U.S. constitutional system, various actors associated with the Republican Party and the Tea Party movement used a networked, coalition-based approach to reach these goals. Although their quest to instill a regime of fiscal conservatism was eventually unsuccessful, they did manage to raise their national profile and set the policy agenda for an extended period.

AbstractThis paper argues for a reappraisal of extant scholarship on delegation in the domain of financial regulation. Through an examination of Japan's experience with financial regulation between 1992 and 2003, it is demonstrated that crisis-induced institutional development entails a shift toward a more flexible, trustee-type bureaucratic structure. While the logic presented in this paper is far from a universally applicable theory of institutional change, it calls into question the relevance of more conventional approaches to the origins of delegation of authority, notably the approach that uses unified and divided government as a key variable. A renewed emphasis on the role of extra-political sources of transfers of authority inside the executive, and also between the legislature and the executive, therefore, is in order.

Intro -- Preface -- Acknowlegdments -- Praise for Policy Agendas in Autocracy, and Hybrid Regimes -- Contents -- Notes on Contributors -- List of Figures -- List of Tables -- Part I Introduction -- 1 Understanding Agenda Dynamics in Non-democracies -- Theoretical Framework -- Regime Typology -- Case Selection -- The Outline of the Book -- Contributions -- References -- Part II Theory and Research Strategy -- 2 The Effect of Political Regimes on Policy Agendas: A Theoretical Framework -- Content, Process, and Discourse -- Content -- Procedures and Actors -- Discourses -- Conclusion -- References -- 3 Hungarian Regimes and Their Institutional Characteristics -- The Proto-Parliamentarism of Dualism -- The Horthy Era: The Traditional Authoritarianism of the Interwar Period -- The Kádár Regime: Socialist Autocracy -- Liberal and Illiberal Democracy: The Post-Transition Republic and the Orbán Regime -- Conclusion -- References -- 4 The Data and Methods of the Hungarian Comparative Agendas Project -- Data Collection -- The CAP Policy Topic Coding System -- The Description of the Datasets Used in This Book -- The Input Phase -- The Policy Process Phase -- The Output Phase -- Methodology -- References -- Part III The Dynamics of Policy Agendas in Four Regimes of Hungarian History -- 5 The Pre-war Era of Proto-parliamentarism (1867-1918) -- The Policy Agenda of the Dual Monarchy -- Decision-Making and Information Processing in the Era of Dualism -- Overview of the Databases -- An Empirical Description of the Agenda During the Period of Dualism -- The General Features of Individual Policy Arenas -- Fulfilling Electoral Promises and Policy Responsiveness in the Dual Monarchy -- Case Studies: Important and Characteristic Policy Areas of Dualism -- The Constitutional Debate: An Unresolved Structural Conflict.

A 2022 óta zajló orosz–ukrán háborúban az Egyesült Államok Ukrajna kulcsfontosságú gazdasági és katonai szövetségeseként lépett fel. Bár a Biden-adminisztráció határozottan kiállt Ukrajna győzelemig tartó támogatása mellett, döntését a politikai eliten belül nem övezte teljes konszenzus. Tanulmányunk az amerikai külpolitikai ideológiák és politikai polarizáció szakirodalmára építve a politikai eliten belüli geopolitikai törésvonalakat vizsgálja. Ennek kapcsán a 2024-es elnökjelöltek megszólalásait, valamint a 118. Kongresszus Ukrajnával kapcsolatos törvényjavaslatait és törvényjavaslat-módosításait elemezzük. A jelöltek és képviselők három fő csoportját azonosítjuk a háború kapcsán (héják, mérsékeltek, izolacionisták), valamint a Republikánus Pártra jellemző alacsonyabb külpolitikai frakciófegyelem és nagyobb ideológiai eltérések okait is értékeljük.

Abstract
In this paper, we summarise the key findings of the forum "Data4Parliaments" Parliamentary Data for a Better Democracy, organised by the OPTED network at the European Parliament on 15 June 2022. The aim of the conference was to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas related to sharing and analysing parliamentary text data between official archives and different user groups from the social sciences and the civil society.

Abstract
Disenchantment with global finance in Central-Eastern Europe enabled financial nationalism to emerge as a counter-hegemonic strategy. In Hungary, Prime Minister Orbán put forth his explicit aim to increase domestic ownership in banking to over 50% and legitimized the ensuing re-nationalization of the financial sector with resentment over neoliberal banking practices. The article describes how the financial crisis created an opportunity for Orbán and his allies to usher in a new era of financial ownership structures. It provides a critical political economy analysis of how the Orbán government selected economic sectors to target and how it used a network of associated private actors in its quest to re-nationalize and then re-privatize major banks to a newly created elite, the 'national capitalists'. In this, financial nationalism constituted a grand strategy to reconstruct Hungarian capitalism in order to regain autonomy and assure long-term political survival within a liberal EU context.

AbstractIn this article, we present a machine learning-based solution for matching the performance of the gold standard of double-blind human coding when it comes to content analysis in comparative politics. We combine a quantitative text analysis approach with supervised learning and limited human resources in order to classify the front-page articles of a leading Hungarian daily newspaper based on their full text. Our goal was to assign items in our dataset to one of 21 policy topics based on the codebook of the Comparative Agendas Project. The classification of the imbalanced classes of topics was handled by a hybrid binary snowball workflow. This relies on limited human resources as well as supervised learning; it simplifies the multiclass problem to one of binary choice; and it is based on a snowball approach as we augment the training set with machine-classified observations after each successful round and also between corpora. Our results show that our approach provided better precision results (of over 80% for most topic codes) than what is customary for human coders and most computer-assisted coding projects. Nevertheless, this high precision came at the expense of a relatively low, below 60%, share of labeled articles.

AbstractOne of the major political narratives in the build-up to the critical parliamentary election of 2010 in Hungary was related to the "government of bankers." Pre-2010 governments earned this label by the opposition based on their supposed close relationship with banking interests and for purportedly formulating financial and tax policy according to the needs of major financial institutions. In this article, we examine the preference attainment of the Hungarian Banking Association, the pre-eminent interest group in banking, and that of OTP, the biggest bank in Hungary, in order to evaluate this popular claim. The article addresses this challenge by comparing the policy influence of Hungarian Banking Association and OTP in the government cycles ending and starting in 2010. We adopt a computer-assisted qualitative content analysis framework and juxtapose the policy positions of the interest group in their formal communications with actual legislation related to the same issues. Results show that the general preference attainment of the banking lobby on major policy issues decreased after 2010—nevertheless, seismic activity was already under way after 2006.

The article investigates the dynamics of budgeting and its explanatory factors in Hungary based on a new database. Previous work for the period between 1991 and 2013 demonstrated that year-on-year changes in budgetary allocations by policy topics show a leptokurtic distribution. This distribution of policy changes is generally associated with the notion of punctuated equilibrium. We extend this analysis to cover over 155 years of Hungarian budgetary history. Our investigation of a database of 2580 spending category observations (covering the period between 1868 and 2013) lends support for the theory of punctuated equilibrium. We also analysed the impact of political regimes on budgetary dynamics. Here we provided empirical evidence for the validity of the informational advantage hypothesis which states that democracies will show lower level of kurtosis than other political regimes. This finding is also in line with the results of available comparative studies.

The article presents a theoretical synthesis that could serve as the conceptual framework for empirical studies of the fulfilment of electoral pledges in modern democracies. Studies related to the program-to-policy linkage derived their hypotheses, for the most part, from an implicit, common sense model of mandate theory. The article presents a realistic version of positive mandate theory, one that is stripped of its normative assumptions and is suitable for empirical testing. It is informed by five theoretical building blocks: the concept of the binding mandate, the party theory of representation, the doctrine of responsible party government, modern normative mandate theory and the conceptual pair of delegation and mandate. The resulting framework incorporates the information content of the campaigns, the definiteness of the authorization and the strength of pledge enactment as its core components.

A Hungarian Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) az MTA TK Politikatudományi Intézetében működik, célja a magyar közpolitika dinamikájának feltárása a különböző közpolitikai és politikai napirendek kvantitatív társadalomtudományi eszközökkel történő vizsgálatával. Mindehhez az Egyesült Államokban Frank Baumgartner és Bryan Jones nevével fémjelzett Policy Agendas Project közpolitikai tartalomelemző kódkönyvét adaptálja hazai környezetben. A kutatás azt célozza, hogy konzisztens adatbázist hozzon létre a magyar közpolitikai folyamatok meghatározó aktorai – így a parlament, a média és a közvélemény szereplői – számára meghatározó ügyekről. A mérések megbízhatóságát az egyértelműen megszabott, koherens kódolási szabályok garantálják, amelyek révén a kormányzat prioritásainak változásai időben és közpolitikai területenként konzisztens módon nyomon követhetők. Az Egyéni választókerületek adatbázis az egyéni választókerületekről nyújt tájékoztatást az 1990 és 2010 közötti időszakról. Az adatok a magyar Nemzeti Választási Iroda hivatalos oldaláról (http://valtor.valasztas.hu/valtort/jsp/t0.jsp) származnak. Az adatbázisban szereplő legfontosabb változók az alábbiakra terjednek ki: az egyéni választókerület neve (smd_name), az egyéni választókerületi képviselő pártjának neve (party_affilitation) és a magyar települések hivatalos neve (settlement_name).

AbstractDynamic agenda representation assumes a linkage between the policy emphases prescribed by various democratic inputs (electoral promises and public opinion polls) and policy agendas ranging from the media to executive orders. An extrapolation of this idea would propose that, in the U.S. context, policy emphasis in major programmatic messages such as State of the Union addresses would be followed by the president's day‐to‐day communication. We investigate this congruence with a new database of presidential speeches that, for the first time, offers a deep learning‐enhanced sentence‐level policy topic coding of various forms of the speeches U.S. presidents made from Truman to Trump (for a total count of 16,523 speeches divided into nearly 2 million individual sentences). Using this database, we demonstrate that presidents' occasional, day‐to‐day remarks strongly correlate with the annual policy messages—in this sense, presidents are staying on the democratic script.

Abstract
The article examines the concept of legislative backsliding and offers a measurement strategy for its empirical analysis. Legislative backsliding is defined as a move away from liberal democracy in four critical dimensions of legislative quality, its public policy; legal-constitutional-formal; procedural; and stability aspects. We operationalise each of these dimensions with their separate indices relying on components such as stakeholder consultations, time passed between bill introduction and passing the law as well as results of constitutional reviews. We use qualitative mini case studies from Hungary, widely considered from 2010 on to be a poster child for democratic backsliding, to illustrate the viability of the proposed measurement strategy. We find that laws which show deficiencies in terms of legislative quality exhibit them in not just but several dimensions. Based on the case studies we offer insights into scaling up the law-level analysis to the level of legislative cycles and show how the legislative quality index can be used to measure macro-level legislative backsliding.