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• The 2019 local elections in Szeged

  52-66

  György Fábián

  Views:

  168

  The 2019 local, municipal election outclasses the second-order elections in the given political constellation. This is especially true in the case of Szeged, where the opposition – unlike the situation at the national level – has the power for a long time. To change this situation, the governing parties, taking advantage of their dominant position – and using all means – conducted a very vigorous campaign, changing the city into a battlefield. According to the results, the governemt’s attempt was not successfull, it was rather contraproductive. The reigning mayor and city management won an unprecedented victory. The root cause of it is a special urban policy which extracted the local politics from the partyfights and overrode party interests, and which represented the interests of the city succesfully and with credibility even against cross-wind. Based on the cooperation of the entire opposition the implemented urban policy is symbolized by and embodied in the person of the mayor in office since 2002.

• What’s the matter? A text mining analysis of political topics and user engagement on politicians’ Facebook pages during the 2018 Hungarian general election campaign

  94-123.

  Bene Marton

  Views:

  173

  The research investigates the way users interact with leading topics of the 2018 Hungarian
  general election campaign on candidates’ Facebook pages. It expects that the prominent
  (immigration, corruption) and campaign-related topics generate more user engagement, while
  policy topics and mobilization content are less interacted. It also tests the theory of issue ownership
  in relation with user engagement. These expectations are tested on a dataset that includes all
  posts (38030 posts) posted by all candidates during the campaign (511 candidates). Topics
  are identified by text mining methods. The study demonstrates that corruption, development
  policy and campaign are highly engaged topics, while immigration was more interacted only on
  opposition politicians’ pages since the followers of pro-government candidates engage less with
  immigration-related content. The most surprising result is that a reversed issue ownership effect
  can be detected since politicians are generally less successful with their own topics.

• The 2022 Italian election under the microscope

  53-72

  Fanni Tanács-Mandák

  Views:

  377

  The 2022 parliamentary elections marked a turning point for the Italian political system in many ways. As a result of the measures approved and introduced over the past almost ten years to change the electoral system (electoral reforms, decisions of the Constitutional Court, constitutional amendments, parliamentary reforms, etc.), Italian voters had the opportunity to elect the new members of both chambers of the parliament under the same electoral system, for the first time in the Republican era. The purpose of the article is to present the steps leading to this historic moment by analysing in detail the different measures affecting the electoral system and their impact. The paper then describes the electoral results and explains the processes leading to the vast victory of Italy’s first female Prime Minister, with a particular focus on the return to the bipolar logic favoured by the electoral system following the release of the three-pole system in 2013.