At a research in the Biharkeresztes micro-region (conducted via semi-structured interviews) we
asked family households living in poverty. Roma households were mostly among the respondents.
We also found that that estimated number of Roma population in the settlements correlated to
the number of people working in public service. The examination of age structure diagrams at
the settlements showed that the ones the mayors estimated to have a higher Roma population,
are the younger settlements. The fact that there can be a causal relationship between these
phenomena is supported by numerous previous researches (Kemény, 2004; Molnár, 2007). These
researches pointed out the effect of poverty ethnicisation in Hungary (Ladányi – Szelényi, 2004).
Furthermore, a research conducted in 2007 at the neighbouring Szabocs-Szatmár-Bereg County
also confirmed the ethnicisation theory (Fónai et al.). The aim of this study is to examine the
possibility of poverty ethnicisation at the five settlements of the Biharkeresztes micro-region,
with the help of the implemented qualitative inquiry, previous researches, and databases from
CSO and TeIR .

This article observes a paradigm shift occurred in several disciplines of social science which
also differs in theoretical and methodological aspects from science pursuing objectivity. The
interpretative social sciences primarily focus on the study of meaning and sets texts and talks
into the centre of understanding. Social facts are taking place in an intersubjective sphere,
namely among each other. In this paper they are consequently called ‘socially meaningful facts’.
Therefore, understanding and meaning of these socially meaningful facts can be study without
snapping social reality by means of different survey techniques, which would also necessarily
reduce the richness of social meanings.
In this paper the vote is given for the transition of discourse approach into a paradigm.
A couple of aspects are introduced in order to make an attempt to prove its scientific significance. On the other hand misunderstandings are also falsified. According to these misconceptions, a
text-based approach and an actual postmodern scientific scheme is nothing else than a literary
project, which also denies the pure existence of reality and only considers all previous knowledge
as relative. Instead of that, this paper states that every single fact of society has meaning which
is mediated through narratives by the language itself.

 Intersectionality as an inequality conception or a particular perspective was already introduced to the readers of the Metszetek in 2014. In this study I undertake to review some methodological approaches to intersectionality. Moreover, I strive to make an effort to emphasize the adaptibility of intersectionality. Based on the new tendency which has been noticable recently in the inequality dimensions. I delineate, this tendency has completely transformed the focus away from an overemphasis on gender equality towards those suffering multiple, complex forms of discrimination. Many of the feminist scholars deal and dealt with the connection to inequality dimensions (principally race, class and gender). Necessary to pinpoint that indeed intersectionality does not command an unitary definition. A vast number of the international feminist scholars created their own intersectionalty definition, from which I am going to underline some. From among the methodological approaches I focus on Choo and Ferree’s intersectional statement; “Inclusion-centered interpretations, Process-centered models, Systemic intersectionality: Institutional interpenetration”. In this paper I announce two sociological studies that were undertaken using intersectionality method. Finally a summary is presented that undelines why it is worth scholars exploiting intersectionality as a methodology?

The aim of this paper is to describe power relations, doctor-patient relationships among the
many ongoing changes in health care from sociological point of view. This paper is based on
interviews with 17 people who work in various fields of health care. To conduct the interviews as
well as to write the paper, a number of concepts and theoretical approaches were resorted to:
Dominique Memmi’s ’delegated biopower’, Eve Bureau and Judith Hermann-Mesfen’s notion of
’contemporary patient’, François Dubet’s concept of institutional programme as well as results of
Hungarian health sociology. The main focuses of interest of the paper are role models in health
care, the characteristics and consequences of new doctor-patient relations, their manifestations
in Hungary as well as potentials of defencelessness and autonomy in Hungarian health care.

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According to our common experience of political life, the relationship between politics and
conflicts seems to be obvious. However, it is also common to think about delimiting the intensity
of conflicts in a democratic context. This kind of complexity of the relation of democracy and
conflicts can be cexplained from two theoretical perspectives. First, in order to protect democratic
order, conflicts may lose their relevance in comparison to the value of consent or compromise. Second, even if we accept the importance of conflicts, we also should take into account the limits
of their intensity. These theoretical problems arise in the context of contemporary politics which
nature is eminently public and in which every announcement is open to discussion. This is what
discourse as a theoretical horizon means. The core concept for theorizing the conflictual character
of politics in a discursive manner is political debate. The article explores three kinds of debate
and communicative conflicts: John Stuart Mill, as a classical nineteenth century liberal, sheds
light on the importance of debate in issues of collective truth-seeking and emotional devotion
to our personal values. Márton Szabó, a leading theorist of political discourse in Hungary, also
treats debate as a core concept of political discourse studies, and theorizes debate not only as
a series of singular acts in the realm of politics, but as a mode of existence of politics itself.
Contrary to other contemporary ideas of communication and politics, discourse is therefore
inherently conflictual in its character. Similarly, but more embedded in contemporary debates
over democracy, Chantal Mouffe, one of the eminent theorists of agonism, interprets conflicts
in the context of democratic order, and emphasises the democratic conditions for constructing
democratic identities. Her ideas on agonistic democracy can fathom the relation of valuable
conflicts and their limits in a democratic regime.

In political theory, the criticism of Rawlsian constructivist liberalism has been articulated in
theories of political realism. John Gray, one of the promoters of realist liberalism, recommends
a neo-Hobbesian way of social coexistence which is based on the conflictual and antagonistic
idea of political life. It takes social values and forms of life as incommensurable in modern
multicultural societies. Taking value-pluralism and its conflicts seriously, a theory of modus
vivendi has been articulated among realist political thinkers. Being a post-liberal (or post-Enlightenment) theory, modus vivendi is more a practice oriented and open-ended theory than
philosophical constructions based on high morality. Modus vivendi theorists make an emphasis
on the peaceful co-existence of social groups and a moral minimum of the political society. One of
the deficiency of the theory is that it says not much about democracy, though it would be highly
useful according to two contextual considerations.On the one hand, a modern political system
would be impossible or outrageous without any form of democratic legitimacy. On the other
hand, there is an exhaustion of the liberal project(s) and the societies featured by multicultural
prosperity. Besides constitutional protection, defending democracy in this new context means
balancing between cultural and other value-oriented groups in modern societies. In my paper,
I make an attempt to examine the concept of democracy in the light of modus vivendi theory.

Contrary to widely held expectations, the third wave of democratization has brought about not
only democracy but also the emergence of many regimes of whichtraditional democratic theory
cannot make sense. The overwhelmingly dichotomous, teleological, and minimalist approaches
fail to adequately describe political regimes in the grey zone between outright autocracy and
full-fledged democracy. In our essay, we discuss the theoretical approaches that aim to grasp
what has been increasingly called hybrid regimes, namely political regimes that combine
autoritharian and democratic elements. We point to the theoretical and empirical limitations
of these efforts and argue that the concept of hybrid regimes is still inextricably linked with the
concept of liberal democracy. Nevertheless, even if the existing approaches to hybrid regimes
suffer from a series of shortcomings, by providing fine-grained and more realistic descriptions of regime transformations, they make an important contribution to the literature on political
regimes.