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• Political development: what, why, how? A comparative framework for Hungarian history

  5-26

  Ervin Csizmadia

  Views:

  90

  The 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.

• Political science and the perception of time: Cyclical rotation between the present-centric and the historical perspective

  94-130.

  Csizmadia Ervin

  Views:

  31

  In 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.