Suchergebnisse

Abstract
In this paper, I examine some problematic aspects of minority self-governments, more specifically non-territorial cultural or national-cultural autonomy, through an analysis of the cases of the Hungarian minorities in Romania and Serbia. Although the Hungarian minority élites have put forward demands and plans for various forms of autonomy in both countries after 1990, only one particular form of minority self-government, namely national-cultural autonomy, proved to be acceptable for the majority, and eventually such a system was only implemented in Serbia but not in Romania. The focus in the article is more on the form than on the content of autonomy as the design of the institutions of self-government is of central importance also with regard to the power relations within the imagined political community of the minority. Despite the differences between the legal-institutional systems of minority protection of the two states, the patterns of minority élite behaviour were rather similar in the two analysed cases, the institutional form of the envisaged autonomy becoming a very divisive issue and exerting a strong impact on the internal political dynamics of the minorities.

The Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania (RMDSZ) has been the most stable actor in the Romanian party system over the past two decades. However, in this article, we argue that beyond this apparent stability, the linkages between RMDSZ and its voters have undergone a gradual, yet significant shift. The ethnic block voting of Transylvanian Hungarians was closely connected to the concept of a self-standing and parallel "Minority Society," and to the practices of institution building that the minority elites engaged in in the early 1990s. However, since its first participation in the Romanian government in 1996, RMDSZ has gradually departed from this strategy, a phenomenon that was also closely connected to a process of elite change within the organization. The present RMDSZ leadership puts less and less emphasis on policy programs that could reinforce the institutional system of the minority; consequently, it is unable (and unwilling) to organizationally integrate the community activists of the minority society who previously had played a key role in the process of (electoral) mobilization. At the rhetorical level, RMDSZ did not abandon the goal of building a parallel Hungarian minority society, but in its linkages to the Hungarian electorate, clientelistic exchanges have become predominant.

Abstract
While the issue of the Szekler autonomy has attracted considerable tabloid interest in the past two decades, it is rarely addressed in more systematic, scholarly accounts available for a wider international audience. The political project of achieving some form of autonomy has been on the agenda of several political actors speaking in the name of Romania's sizeable Hungarian minority after 1989 and constitutes the object of heated debate between those actors and authorities of the Romanian state. In 2020 this debate recorded a peak which will seemingly require a new approach on behalf of protagonists, if the project is meant to be kept alive. This paper aims to fill some of the above-mentioned scholarly gap by providing an account of the parliamentary reception of the draft autonomy conceptions submitted by ethnic Hungarian politicians to Romania's parliament in the three decades that passed since the regime change. Based on a content analysis of documents produced during the legislative process, we identify the most important arguments, as well as a number of procedural tricks deployed by Romanian politicians and political parties against the autonomy initiatives. We also emphasize the differences between the reception and trajectories of the bills, which is clearly related to the authorship and political backing of the various autonomy drafts. This comparative analysis also allows the formulation of a number of conclusions concerning the prospects of the Hungarian autonomy movement.

Drawing on an original sample of 351 elections held in new and consolidated democracies from 1960 to 2013, this article examines the likelihood that new parties gain parliamentary representation as a function of electoral system permissiveness and contextual factors that shape political entrepreneurs' perception of political opportunity. We distinguish between the success of genuinely new parties and that achieved by splinters or parties formed through mergers. We find that the district magnitude matters for the success of all three types of newcomers, while the electoral formula and proportionality matter only for the parliamentary entry of splinter parties. Another novel finding is that government instability facilitates the success of genuinely new and splinter parties. The analysis also shows that, irrespective of the type of transition, the more elections have taken place since then, the less likely it becomes that genuinely new parties and merger new parties enter parliament.

Our article investigates minority voting behaviour through an in-depth analysis of the case of Transylvanian Hungarians, one of the politically mobilised ethnic groups of post-communist Eastern Europe. Members of this minority community have overwhelmingly supported RMDSZ, a robust ethnic party, in each of the parliamentary (and other types of) elections following the regime change. We argue that both macro-political processes and the micro-foundations of voting behaviour should be analysed to properly understand the factors conducive to ethnic block voting. Our main focus is on micro-determinants; however, we also discuss some elements of the macro-political context. Without considering these factors we cannot account for the sustained ethnic mobilisation of the minority group in question. However, the main goal of this article is to provide a micro-level analysis of voting behaviour. We focus primarily on turnout, which is the most important determinant of electoral outcomes in the case under analysis. Our main empirical question is whether the impact of the main factors discussed in the theories of electoral turnout is similar in the case of minority (Transylvanian Hungarian) and national (Romanian) electorates. We conclude that social embeddedness has different effects on the two populations: namely, embeddedness measured through network density supports political mobilisation only in the case of the minority group.

hesitancy toward COVID-19 vaccines was not particularly high in Romania at the beginning of the vaccination campaign. Nevertheless, the country became one of the laggards in the European Union in terms of vaccination rates. We aim to provide an empirical explanation for this phenomenon based on a representative survey conducted in November–December 2021. We test the influence of various factors on vaccine hesitancy, such as personal experiences with the disease, trust in relevant institutions, general worldviews, and the contact with certain institutions, such as the Romanian Orthodox Church, and general practitioners. Furthermore, we find that three COVID-specific cognitive factors played a crucial role in this respect, namely the evaluation of anti-COVID state measures, belief in COVID-related conspiracy theories, and, especially, fears of negative effects of COVID-19 vaccines. The high explanatory power of these three factors also shows that low vaccination rates were not inevitable consequences of some "inherent" attitudinal characteristics widespread in the Romanian society; on the contrary, vaccine hesitancy has developed as an unfortunate side effect of weak crisis management, as the government and relevant state institutions failed to properly utilize key organizational resources, such as the national network of general practitioners, and proved to be unable to dissipate fears and countervail the spread of conspiracy theories, while emergency measures did not resonate enough among the Romanian public.