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• Incumbency advantage of mayors in cities with county rights in Hungary

  40-51

  László Petrovszki

  Views:

  46

  There are twenty-three cities with county rights in Hungary. These cities are playing extremely important role because of their location, population and their administrative duties. For these reasons they can fall prey to national parties and political actors even during local elections. The aim of this study is to analyze these settlements in regard to the incumbency of mayors. Incumbency means the holding of an office, and the incumbent politician is the current holder of a political office. My goal is to show – by quantitative comparison – that the so-called incumbent advantage is prevalent in these cities. I also examine whether the candidates of the winning parties at the first order general elections are faring better than their competitors.

• Mobilization incongruence in the Hungarian local electioms

  5-24

  Péter Bence Stumpf

  Views:

  41

  In local elections, national voting patterns are often not repeated as results show significant incongruence in terms of turnout, party performance and seat shares. Political science explains these various differences with several distinct theoretical frameworks that approach this incongruence from the aspect of voter behavior. The aim of this study is not to provide an alternative for these conventional explanations but to complement them with the detailed analysis of mobilization in an attempt to clear up certain gaps in the models. My main proposition is that parties can mobilize their supporters for the local elections with differing effectiveness producing incongruence in voter turnout and seat shares. In the capital and in the larger cities there is a mobilization gap mainly affecting left-wing voters that causes lower turnout and weaker electoral performance by these parties. This gap can most probably be explained by a combination of social and institutional factors and has a profound effect on election outcomes.

• The Effects of the 2011 Electoral Reform on the Results of the Hungarian Legislative Elections I. : Theoretical aspects of the reform

  195-209

  Levente Nagy

  Views:

  70

  The second wave of democracy after World Wa II, followed by the third wave in the 1970’s and
  the 80’s – including the historic democratic transitions in Eastern Europe after the collapse
  of the Soviet Empire – led to the expansion of democratic electoral systems around the world.
  The design of electoral systems and of the undergoing electoral reforms has become a vital
  component of the democratization process. The study of the theory and politics of electoral
  reform led to the adoption of new theoretical and methodological approaches in order to cope
  with the challenging phenomena.
  The main goal of this paper is to interpret the concept of reform, and to unfold some of
  theoretical aspects of it in order to identify some of the main components of the concept. With the theoretical approach we can get a better understandic of the reform itself, and we can
  demonstrate that electoral reform is a complex process which should not be reduced to a simplistic
  model in which a few actors driven by a few motives can fully explain the whole phenomenon.
  The theoretical study of the reform can show that some politial events, the established party
  system (first and foremost the distribution of power between the various parties), the type of the
  actual electoral system (its advantages and disadvantages) as well as some contingents factors
  must be taken into consideration in order to have a better understanding of the nature of the
  political arena in which reform proposals are promoted and the reform itself takes place.

• Trojan horse and fig leaf: the role of populism in the global crisis of democracy and the postmodern autocracies

  30-61

  István Benedek

  Views:

  72

  It is my contention that populism could be an appropriate framework to understand and link the phenomena of global crisis of democracy and spread of postmodern autocracies. In order to substantiate this claim with the method of literature review, I have examined first the characteristics of these phenomena and then I have focused the nature of relationship between them, in particular with regard to the complex system of stability of new types of autocracies, in which, I think, populism playing a key role. Populism, understood it as an autocratic interpretation of democracy and representation, could be a particularly dangerous Trojan horse for democracy. Above all, because of its idea of a single, homogeneous and authentic people that can be genuinely represented only by populists, and because of this representative claim is a moralized form of antipluralism. In addition, populism is also an important feature of postmodern autocracies, especially of electoral autocracy. By means of populism, it is possible for these regimes to camouflage and even legitimise the autocratic trends and exercise of power, as well as the creation an uneven playing field for political contestation behind their formally multi-party elections and democratic façade. As a radical turn towards traditional forms of autocracies would be too expensive, postmodern autocrats need manipulated multi-party elections and other plebiscite techniques that could serve as quasi-democratic legitimation, as well as populism that could transform political contestation to a life-and-death struggle and, provides other important cognitive functions. Therefore, populist autocracy, as a paradigmatic type of postmodern autocracies, will remain with us for a long time, giving more and more tasks to researchers involved in them.