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Political science and the perception of time: Cyclical rotation between the present-centric and the historical perspective
94-130.Views:31In the first part of the two-part study the author posits that it is an exciting challenge for political
science to take stock of the scientific paradigms of the past 50 years based on their perspective
of time. The study looks at the past 50 years solely based upon the perception of time and
highlights the four paradigms deemed the most important: political development, transitology,
new historicism, and the school of American Political Development (APD). The study reviews the
authors representative of each paradigm and the most important elements of their arguments. Political scientists were susceptible to the historical perspective between the 1960s and the 80s. Later on, during the 90s until the mid-2000s the perspective for interpretation became
the present. In the last decade however, it seems that the interest in historical perspectives has
returned. The author concludes that a cyclical rotation can be demonstrated within political
science between the two perspectives, the logic of which would be advisable to study. -
Political development: what, why, how? A comparative framework for Hungarian history
5-26Views:90The essay focuses on the comparative analysis of Hungarian political development before 1989–90. Instead of dealing with the 32 years since the change of regime, the author is interested in how many different interpretations of political development can be identified. The author singles out examples of political development in developed countries (for example the United States) as well as developing countries (those countries which have become decolonized in the 1960s). The starting point of the analysis is that Hungary cannot be described by either the categories used for developed countries or those that are used for developing ones. While the essay recognizes that the measure of progress at all times for Hungarian development is the example of Western development, it does not accept the approach according to which Hungarian development is a “dead-end” because it differs from Western development in many ways. The essay puts forward the hypothesis of the “normality” of Hungarian political development.
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How should we think about Europe? The model adaptation and model formation strategy of the Hungarian political elite
110-133Views:49In the past decades, researchers in Hungary have looked at almost all segments of the behavior and organization of elites, nevertheless they have dealt surprisingly little with how external actors (Europe, the West) affect the actions and way of thinking of the elites. The lack of approaches from this perspective is so apparent because the European orientation of the elites has changed twice in the past thirty years. (In the 1980s and starting from the second half of the 1990s.) The essay focuses on presenting two concepts of Europe, of which one is based on model adaptation (the opposition represents this approach) the other on model formation (which is characteristic of the governing parties). The essay shows the origins of both, as well as their connections to macro and micro political motifs. Within the frameworks of this, the study touches upon why the appearance of the model adaptation perspective was adequate in the 1980s as well as to why the model forming approach to Europe appeared on the right in the middle of the 1990s as its challenger. The analysis does more than just dynamically present the past thirty years, it also aims to show that we have to integrate Hungarian political history in a broader sense into our studies if we want to understand the changes that have occurred in the past decades concerning the relationship of the elites to the West. The stratum which Fidesz has brought to surface lays deep in Hungarian political history. We have to take this stratum into consideration even if we find this perhaps unattractive and we reject it.
