Publications of Enyedi, Z.

Persistent Political Divides, Electoral Volatility and Citizen Involvement: The Freezing Hypotheses in the 2004 European Election

Planned publication date October 2010

Agency and the Structure of Party Competition: Alignment, Stability and the Role of Political Elites

Party competition is constrained by socio-demographic factors, identities and value orientations. The study of the adaptation to these constraints is hindered for three main reasons, each of them primarily conceptual in nature. First, the examination of the various constraints is rarely integrated into a comprehensive approach, and therefore we lack even a vocabulary that could allow us to reconstruct the strategies with which parties respond. Second, scholarship gives too little attention to the relationship between temporal stability on the one hand and the positional alignments that link political behavior with socio-demographic characteristics, values and group identity on the other. Third, the study of the agency of political elites is either neglected, or it is done in an ad hoc way. This article identifies various methods by which elites reshape structures, and it links those to a broader framework that allows more comprehensive research connecting political agents and structural constraints in the electoral realm.

The role of agency in cleavage formation

Through the analysis of Hungarian politics, this article demonstrates how parties become embedded in the social, cognitive and emotive structures of societies. The role of agency in cleavage formation is addressed, with a special emphasis on the mechanism through which political parties structure their environments. Next to the popularization of conflict perceptions and the consolidation of camp identities, the development of a more elaborate and segmented organizational structure is identified as an integral part of the process of cleavage formation. Such a structure enables parties to forge coalitions among previously separate social groupings and combine group interests into packages large enough to overcome institutional thresholds of power. The findings indicate that parties are potentially able to cross cleavage lines, re-structure relations within the party system and create new associations between party preferences, socio-structural categories and attitudes. Furthermore, parties seem to be able to alter the relationships between psychologically rooted attitudes and social categories. The study also shows, however, that deep-seated socio-cultural divides limit the power of agency even in new democracies.

Book review : The Seeds of Triumph

This article reviews the book The Seeds of Triumph. Church and State in Gomulka’s Poland / by Hanna Diskin ; Budapest : CEU Press, 2001

The contested politics of positive neutrality in Hungary

Special issue entitled : Church and state in contemporary Europe : the chimera of neutrality

Authoritarianism vs. cultural pressure

This article addresses the issue of personality vs. cultural norms with regard to two related problems: the relationship between authoritarianism and prejudice, and the empirical foundation of the concept of ethnocentrism. The analysis is based on a survey of anti-Gypsy attitudes in two Hungarian cities, Salgótarján and Sopron. A random sample of 400 adolescents was surveyed, including one parent of each adolescent (total N = 800). The two locations differ in aggregate level of anti-Gypsy prejudice, that is, the anti-Gypsy cultural norm, which allows the use of a quasi-experimental design. The results support the empirical foundation of the concept of ethnocentrism, although it was possible to detect the effect of cultural pressure on the connection between anti-Gypsy prejudice and general ethnocentrism. Concerning the effect of cultural pressure on the relationship between authoritarianism and anti-Gypsy prejudice, the results support the cultural pressure model in the youth samples, but contradict this model in the parent samples. Multivariate causal modeling of the youth anti-Gypsy prejudice shows that in both cities authoritarianism and parents' prejudice are significant direct predictors. However, the role of authoritarianism is considerably weaker under condition of higher normative pressure.