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Political socialisation is the process of forming an individual’s political identity, in the course of which the individual’s attitude to politics and political worldview is formed. Political socialisation takes place in different spheres, of which the family and parents are of particular importance. Previous research in Hungary has confirmed that the family is an “incubator” of citizenship. However, there is little data available in Hungary that would allow for a more precise understanding of the transmission of political attitudes. This study investigates political homophily within the family (between parent and child) and the effects of parental political characteristics on the individual in Hungary. Our data are drawn from a nationally representative telephone survey of 2000 respondents sampled in 2023. The results show that in nearly two-thirds of Hungarian families, family members held the same political views during the respondent’s childhood, with the highest proportions of homophily indicators, fathers’ and respondents’ voting activity, and mothers’ and respondents’ conservative-liberal attitudes. The effect of parental characteristics was tested using structural equation modelling (SEM). Parents’ political interests and ideological positions had a strong direct effect on the same child characteristics, but the individual’s political participation and party preference were only indirectly influenced by parents. The success of attitudinal transmission was strongly enhanced if the parents were themselves, homophiles, along with the trait in question. Our results point to the important role of the family as a primary agent in political socialisation and suggest new research directions.

The paper relates to the literature on contemporary non-democratic systems with multi-party elections. It aims to prove that electoral competitiveness is a key concept for understanding these systems, but this concept is currently underdeveloped. It first reviews the main approaches of competition and competitiveness, then, using the widely accepted type of competitive authoritarian hybrid regime, argues that the concept developed by its inventors does not provide sufficient support to detect competitiveness, because the factor of uncertainty used by the concept creators to justify its existence is not accompanied by any real indicators. The conclusion of the article is that competitiveness should therefore be derived not from the unidentifiable uncertainty factor, but from the concept of electoral integrity, which indicates the existence or the absence of genuine (competitive) elections, and from the concept and characteristics of electoral manipulations.

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.

Latvia’s party system has been one of the most unstable in European comparison since the 1990s, essentially since independence and democratization. Although there was a period in the middle of the 2010s, which showed the stabilization of the range of relevant parties and a decrease in the number of parties, by the end of the decade the fluctuation between the parties of the Baltic republics was again high. The Kariņš cabinet, formed after a record long time after the 2018 election, nevertheless set a unique record in the country: it was the first government to complete a full four-year parliamentary term. The government faced two challenges during its tenure, the pandemic that began in the spring of 2020, and the Russian aggression against Ukraine that began on February 24, 2022. Both had a significant impact on the development of the party structure. The aim of this paper is to present the changes in the political palette of Latvian parties in the last two legislative cycles, to analyze the results of the October 2022 election, giving priority to the effects of the Russian-Ukrainian war on the transformation of the party structure and the results of the elections.

The objective of this paper is to explore the Russian interpretation of the concept of security and to question this interpretation. The first part of the essay provides a historical overview of the relationship between NATO and Russia. Although the relationship between NATO and Russia has never been friendly, it has not always been hostile. How did it become so? How did Russian security policy makers come to the conclusion that NATO posed a clear threat to Russia? What is behind Russia’s intransigent stance towards NATO? Is there even a solid basis for this attitude? What does this tell us about the Russian understanding of security? After an overview of the different concepts of security and an examination of the notion of strategic security culture, the second part of the paper attempts to answer these questions. It concludes that Russia’s strategic security culture has imperialist features and points out why, in the longer term, Russia will be the main victim of this.

In this study, we examine fathers’ home-based and school-based involvement to assist the development and achievement of their children. The international literature suggests that fathers are less involved than mothers, and the form of their involvement is also different. However, their home-based and school-based involvement has been shown to have similar positive effects on children’s educational outcomes. We examine the forms of parental involvement based on the typology created by Epstein and Sanders. In our empirical work, we conducted 14 semi-structured interviews with fathers with young children and aimed to delineate father types based on the forms of involvement by conducting a classification of the interviews. Our results show that the first group of fathers are only involved at home; they do not participate in school-related events with their child but report being actively involved in their child’s education and school-related activities at home. Fathers in the second group, on the other hand, are involved not only at home but also in school life. The third type is made up of divorced fathers who, with one exception, are involved at school and at home, which is consistent with the findings in the literature on single fathers with children. In this study, we also attempt to answer the question of how to increase fathers’ school-based involvement. According to the interviewees’ answers, their activity could be encouraged through support from their wife, greater self-confidence, and events organised by schools which are more suited to fathers (sports events, cooking together).

The purpose of this paper, building on the so-called fiscal contract theory, published by Margaret Levi (1988, 1998) and Jeffrey F. Timmons (2005), is to investigate the nature of the relationship between the so-called tax morale and government legitimacy. More specifically, it discusses the important theories and empirical researches to highlight on the significance of the role of the government in influencing citizens’ moral considerations during taxpaying. According to the fiscal contract theory, there is an unspoken agreement between taxpayers and the government to oblige the government to maintain services reflecting on collective needs and to oblige citizens to comply with the law, i.e. to pay their taxes. Thus, taxpaying is voluntary, but conditional. This paper relies on this theory when it argues that fiscal contract is rooted in citizens’ responsibility for their community, inducing their tax morale. In other words, this bilateral agreement suggests, that tax morale, what is rooted in citizens’ responsibility, is a significant factor of taxpaying motivations. 

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