[1] The development of political science in Hungary has to be interpreted against the background of a totalitarian and post-totalitarian tradition and the democratic transformation of 1989. The totalitarian system annihilated all autonomous social sciences, including Hungarian political science from the pre-communist period. In the 1970s, some social scientists began to conduct political analyses and empirical surveys related to attitudes, legitimacy, and public opinion. The first scholars oriented toward a Western type of political science came from other disciplines, such as philosophy (Csaba Gombár), sociology (Kálmán Kulcsár), law (Péter Schmidt), and public administration (József Halász). Hungarians started to participate in International Political Science Association (IPSA) meetings, and thereafter the idea of Hungary having its own political science discipline was on the agenda. The 1979 Moscow International Political Science Association (IPSA) World Congress was the breakthrough, not only for the Hungarians participating, but also for the legitimacy of political science. From the Moscow conference on, one could hardly deny the legitimacy of political science in Hungary (Szoboszlai, 1982; Farkas-Halay, 1984). So-called "legitimizing" debates at the end of the 1970s, especially after the 1979 World Congress of the International Political Science Association (IPSA) in Moscow, set the stage for the institutionalization of political science in Hungary. Is political science possible and useful, for what, and do we need it? What are its relations to history, law, and political theory? All these questions needed to be discussed within the new frame of political and spiritual opportunities after 1989.
[2] Parallel to the process of liberalization starting in the 1980s and concluding with the democratization of 1989, political science gained more and more access to scientific resources and to public life. Some political scientists, such as Attila Ágh, László Lengyel, László Kéri, Mihály Bihari, Kálmán Kulcsár and Béla Pokol, played an important role in the process of democratization, using their expertise to help new political organizations, advising them or the new government and parties. The mass media often asked political scientists to interpret the new institutional setting for the public. The possibility of publishing on subjects taboo in communist times opened up space to publish archive material, to interpret it, and to discuss problems of the new political system. Most of these discussions were tied to current problems of Hungarian democratization, the new institutions, and their balances and imbalances.
[3] After 1989, international political analysis deliberately separated its development from that of political science, meaning that its practitioners left the Hungarian Political Science Association (HPSA) and established their own organization, and the study of international relations went its own way in teaching and in the later development of publication. However, in the mid-1990s, the challenges of EU accession for research and teaching have shown that this separation can no longer be maintained. The Europeanization process, the analysis of globalization and its effects, and studies of global and international governance are newly integrating the community of the policy-related social sciences.
[4] The main research interests today are party systems, elections, public opinion, voting behavior, institutional change, and civil society, especially NGOs. The specific way the regime changed in Hungary - an institutionalized replacement of the old political elite with a new one - took place without major mass mobilizations; and rapid development toward a Western-type party system and with few triumphs for trade unions directed the focus of political science to constitutionalism, elections, elites, and political parties. There are very few projects oriented toward political protest, strikes, trade unions, and corporatism. The most important foreign policy issues are European integration and NATO partnership, of course. The Laszlo Teleki Foundation and Illyés Fouundation provides separate research funds for research on Hungarian minorities in other countries. Thus, ethnic minorities, self-government, and autonomy are also important areas of research. Basic research on political theory and history is located mainly at the universities. The Institute of Political History, the Institute of the 1956 Revolution, and the 20th and 21st Century Foundations are centers of contemporary history and political science research, and they have publication series based on their research materials.
[5] The Hungarian higher education system has recently accepted political science as a major of its own. No more than 500 diplomas have been issued. This means that political science - like economics and sociology - is still not glutting the Hungarian labor market. Until recently, students with a double major such as law/political science or economics/political science could find jobs quite easily in various areas of higher education, civil service, or politics.
[6] Political science at the beginning of the 21st century in Hungary is on the verge of becoming one of the mass curricula channels of social sciences in higher education, but it has been established in the research and scientific qualification system for a longer time.
[7] Hungarian political science, like the social sciences in general, enjoys much more freedom and autonomy than during the communist period; but it is faced with political and social problems and challenges generated by the transformation. The discipline was born in and through the transformation and, like economics and sociology, does not have any institutionalized past in the Communist system.
[8] In Hungary, the destruction of former structures and experiences of social sciences has been limited; the academy of sciences has maintained its position as a kind of "ministry of science", and government-based higher education still has an almost exclusive monopoly, the only exceptions being the reinstitution of church-based higher education and the establishment of some international or foreign (Western) university programs. How is social science restructured under conditions of free access to international market and of academic freedom? Private or association-based social sciences have their own budget for research and teaching; its privileges of access to internal or international communication and resources are equal to those of government-based institutions. Hungary preserves a continental-European style of the domination of government support and control over research and teaching, but since 1989, NGOs have been developing as a form for education and research. Main private institutions, like the Central European University, are foreign; Péter Pázmány and Károli Gáspár Universities are church-based.
[9] After the defeat of the 1956 revolution and especially after the experiments with economic reforms in 1968, the development of Hungary’s social sciences was ambivalent. Hungary’s communist leadership included "softliner" and "hardliner" groups after 1956; their ideas about science policy were different, too. The "softliners" in particular viewed the social sciences as "tools for social engineering", a type of "social technology", and they tried to establish "pseudo-free zones" where research and teaching without the limitations of the ruling ideology and elite could support party-led modernization. This sector enjoyed government/party resources and political support for applied research for the political elite, but its results did not become part of general scientific communication. The majority of the publications and teaching and research units had no free communication with Western or other free social science communities and produced solely for the "official" market. Another segment was the independent sector: dissidents and critical intellectuals who obtained their education and some training at official universities and then gave up or were forced to give up their official carrier, thus breaking with the limitations of the official social science and political discourse (Csizmadia, 1995).
[10] Two institutes of the Central Committee of the Hungarian Communist Party, the Institute for Party History and the Institute for Social Sciences, were important for the development of political science in Hungary and gained recognition after they were transformed and put under public control after 1989. Archive material of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party and of other leftist parties, interviews, and other documentation allowed for the development of a research institution, the (Politikatörténeti Intézet). It was loosely tied to the newly established Hungarian Socialist Party, which governed the country from 1994-1998. Well-known political scientists like Mihály Bihari, Csaba Gombár, Péter Schmidt, László Lengyel, Béla Pokol, László Bruszt, János Simon, István Hülvely, Zsolt Papp, István Balogh, and József Bayer carried out research related to political science at the Institute of Social Science in the 1970s. This group was also connected to universities and other institutes and formed the core group of the Hungarian Political Science Association (HPSA) before 1989. After 1989, the reorganized institute was established as the Institute of Political Science of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Magyar Tudomanyos Akademia/MTA - Politikatudományi Intézete).
[11] There was also a "dissident social science discourse" with elements of political analysis, political theory, and philosophical debates. Some intellectuals had professional social science education, defined research interests, and the desire to disseminate their research results in a kind of "alternative education" (Szilágyi, 1999). Though their numbers were limited, they had considerable impact on Hungary’s pseudo-free official social science community as well as on Western social sciences. Before and after 1956, there was a Hungarian "exile social science community" in Western political and other social sciences - for example, Iván Szelényi, Ágnes Heller, Mihály Vajda, Péter Kende, Charles Gáti, Iván Völgyes, Rudolf Tőkés, etc. These people had connections to the dissidents and also an impact on official social and political analysis (Faragó, 1986). Some Hungarian dissidents were relevant for the development of political science, like Miklós Haraszti, Miklós Tamás Gáspár, György Bence, György Konrád, Miklós Szabó, Ágnes Heller, and Ferenc Fehér, among others.
[12] Among the various Western foundations supporting social science development, the joint George Soros/Hungarian Academy of Sciences network (Quigley, 1997; Nóvé, 1999) was especially beneficial; since the mid-1980s, it has provided official and unofficial Hungarian social scientists interested in political research with broader opportunities to participate in Western education and research. The Soros network, today fully developed regionally and globally, began its Eastern European activities in Hungary. It certainly had a great impact on the opening up of the old system and on the early renewal of the social sciences, including of political science. The Soros-HAS programs included fellowships, conference grants, equipment, research costs, and books for the groups of the unofficial and of the official but non-dogmatic scientists and intellectuals. The appearance of the Soros Foundation, combined with the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, was a clear sign of regime change in the 1980s. Its activities in political science have included:
[13] This had a great impact on the political and intellectual transformation in Hungary and the whole region.
[14] A wide range of pre-communist traditions was rediscovered and popularized by the founders of political science in Hungary. There is a debate whether these traditions have anything to say for re-emerging political science of the new millennium in Hungary (Balogh-Bayer, 1999 versus Lánczi, 2001/a).
[15] My own interpretation of the relevance of pre-communist political science and theory, especially of theory in the democracy tradition, is as follows. Hungarian culture and education developed after the Habsburg Empire finished the "reconquista" of state territory from the Ottoman Empire at the end of the 17th century. The Habsburgs consolidated their power against the rebellious Protestant Hungarian elites in the 18th century. During the 19th century, in the process of establishing the national and liberal values of a civil society against Habsburg rule, a current of critical political thought with contributions toward a scholarly political analysis developed. On the other hand, the official state science, "Staatswissenschaft", and cameral science, "Kameralistik", were part of the university curricula for lawyers and administrators, too (Arczt, 1987).
[16] Hungarian contributions to the theory of democracy and civil society came from unofficial, critical political thinkers, forced into inner or outer emigration (Nagy, 1994; Schlett, 1996, 1999) during their lifetimes. Some of them held official teaching positions in Hungary, but they were not part of the official Staatswissenschaft. József Eötvös (1813-1871), an activist of the 1848-49 national and democratic revolution and an émigré in Germany, wrote and published in German against the Habsburgs, and later returned to Hungary (Schlett, 1987; Eötvös, 1981). Oszkár Jászi (1875-1957), an activist in the 1918 republican revolution and later an émigré in the USA until his death, publishing there in English (Jászi, 1989), worked against both the Habsburgs and the nationalism of Hungarian elites and for a civil society. An opponent of Fascism and later of Communism was István Bibó (1911-1979), an activist both in the 1945 national and democratic renewal and in the 1956 revolt against Stalinism, published in English in the 1960s (with the help of the UK political scientists, Bernard Crick and Bibó, 1986) after long prison years in "inner emigration".
[17] There are many parallels in the life stories of these three thinkers, whom I regard as the mainstream tradition of the theory of democracy and civil society in Hungary: All of them were long excluded from the official Hungarian discourses, they played an active role in the higher ranks of politics for awhile, and they had to come to theoretical terms with their defeat in emigration, and this had some fruitful impact on their political theory.
[18] So, we find a Staatswissenschaft tradition irrelevant to the modern social sciences and the theory of democracy; a "nominal" political science; and a "critical" unofficial tradition of critical and innovative political theory, relevant to the theory of democracy and civil society in Hungary. Established and boring political science versus an unofficial, interesting, and critical "dissent" that developed parallel to the former in a rather non-communicative way between 1848 and 1989. The communist period continued these patterns of development that had been established in the previous systems, so the schism between official and unofficial continued, and the new dissenting political science looked back upon the old one. The pre-communist traditions had a symbolic alternative character for generations of dissent and opposition in Hungary that criticized and rejected official Marxism-Leninism. Needless to say, current socio-political orientations determined which earlier Hungarian political thinkers they considered interesting; nationalists, liberals, and socialists had and have their preferences within the range of pre-communist political analysis in Hungary.
[19] One author suggests that the political science that grew from Western Marxism and oppositional discourses has led to a "society versus the state" paradigm, with a latent or manifest plea for the idea of the self-government of civil society (Körösényi, 1996, 1999/a). In his view, this trend is overwhelming in the Hungarian and generally in post-communist political science communities. To counterbalance this "hidden continuation of Marxism" and leftism, he says the new political science must be rooted in the government-oriented study of politics, in analytical policy and the tradition of studying governance. This approach maintains that Marxism and leftism survived the fall of Communism and that the nominal decline in references to the Marxist tradition does not mean a new beginning. It is true that, after 1989, some subjects of the oppositional discourses, like Central Europe, human rights, and civil society, became major foci and topoi of political science discourse and entailed a continuation of the international opposition discourses in a new institutionalized setting. Theories of democracy and civil society, mainly liberal and neo-liberal ones, emerged from these circles of scholars (Kis, 1987; 1997; 2000; Halmai, 1990; 1994), disseminated by the international and especially regional networks of the Soros Foundations and Open Society Institutes. But the same institutions also support sober public policy analyses and government studies (Körösényi, 1999; Stark and Bruszt, 1998; Tóka, 1995; 1999). One may have doubts whether Marxism survived in the political sciences and in the other social sciences after its death in the post-communist region, as hypostased. "Transitology" also focuses on democratization, so it has also been a trend supportive of the dominant civil society paradigm (Bozóki; Körösényi and Schöpflin, 1992; Miszlivetz, 1999; Szoboszlai, 1991, 1992). But a closer look at the transition literature shows that, especially in the beginning, it was highly oriented toward institutions and elites and only later included approaches stressing the role of political culture and civil society.
[20] Among Hungarian émigré political scientists, György Schöpflin (London School of Economics), Iván Völgyes (University of Nebraska, died in an airplane crash in Hungary in 2001, commemorated in Politikatudományi Szemle, Vol. 10, No. 1-2, 5-7), Rudolf Tőkés (University of Connecticut), Andrew Arató (New York City, New School of Social Research), and Andrew C. János (University of California at Berkeley) played especially important roles in organizing research teams and projects on Hungarian transition in a comparative perspective and in helping young scholars to gain fellowships and publication possibilities.
[21] Let’s have an overview of the subjects of these discussions, based on the ten volumes of the academic journal of political science, Politikatudományi Szemle (Political Science Review).
[22] The Hungarian system is a parliamentary one, but in the early 1990s there were tensions between the first president’s drives and the constitutional rules, which were interpreted by the Constitutional Court. The debate brought up interesting comparative materials on the separation of powers and regime types.
[23] The suppressed, "catacomb"-type civil societies of the region were liberated during the transition, but new institutions and rules have developed that exert influence and constraints on them. Dissenters’ civil society utopias are confronted with the post-communist reality of political apathy and alienation in Hungary and elsewhere.
[24] Non-Communist political directions were banned to a common garbage can in the Communist system, but after 1989, a new differentiation, cleavage system, and party system developed and organized in various patterns and profiles; classical Lipset-Rokkan cleavage theory is applied to interpret this new system.
[25] The "Party-State" was almighty and powerful in the communist era; after 1989, the two domains separated, and the power of the state was pressed to reduce, but at the same time the transformation itself, its regulation, and its institutionalization in the economy and in civil society assigned new and great tasks to the state. The preservation of state neutrality makes divergent challenges to the post-communist political realm.
[26] What is the future of politics? Is there any politics in a globalized new world where nation-states diminish and supranational coordination mechanisms emerge?
[27] What are the requirements for pluralist democracy and stability in a new political system where legacies of the past and challenges of the international environment, of economic transformation, and of social tensions test the performance of democratic institutions? Do liberalism and democracy have their own Hungarian roots, or do they share in the international crisis of liberalism?
[28] The general elections repeatedly exhibit the interplay of these factors of political behavior, institutions, and their country-specific features. Political apathy, a process of concentration in the parties, dominant majority elements, and the disproportionality of the electoral system produce the ambivalent consequences of stable governments and party concentration.
[29] The constitution-making debate is unreal in the sense that we do not have a systematic, new post-communist constitution in Hungary, but a complex of piecemeal modifications by Parliament and the Constitutional Court of the old, communist constitution. How should we develop a new one: through expertise, referendum, compromise?
[30] Hungary and the millions of Magyars abroad have a public sensitive to these questions in times when the role of the nation-state is diminishing due to globalization, Europeanization, and regional autonomy. Minority rights protection is still a matter of politics with and against the state.
[31] EU enlargement has implications for the institutions and policy processes of the new Hungarian democracy. What are the requirements? Are there EU patterns in the different areas of politics, polity, and policy? What can we expect accession to result in? Will Hungarian democracy have a second transition after ten years of democratization? And if so, how?
[32] Debate after 1989 focused sharply on pre-communist traditions in Hungary, raising questions like: Do we have any? Are they helpful in establishing or re-establishing a new political science? The main focus of the debate was on the relevance, existence, or rejection of former Hungarian traditions (Balogh-Bayer, 1999; Lánczi, 2001/a). In the mid-1990s, András Körösényi articulated the problem of the re-emergence of a still dominant Marxist-Leftist paradigm (1996; 1999/a). A generally debated thesis was that Western patterns and research were colonializing the social sciences in the post-communist countries (György Csepeli; Antal Örkény and Kim Schepple, 1997). The most recent identity discourse in the Political Science Review 1999-2000 is about political science’s boundaries with journalism, political essays, and analysis writing for the public, which try to define the limits of academic analysis, policy-making, and public debates in a pluralistic political system. The role of the think tanks and of political science in policy making was earlier articulated in the 1998-1999 debate in the Political Science Review; again, the question was the practical efficacy of the science and the limits of its scientific mission. Erzsébet Szalai (2000), the winner of the 2000 Bibó Prize, initiated at the weekly Élet és Irodalom (Life and Literature) another discourse on the lack of critical social science in post-1989 Hungary.
[33] Surveying the wide range of topics of debates, we may state that the basics of the new politics were at the forefront of the debate, which translations of texts by major Western political scientists connected to international and European debates and which reflected Hungarian political and public issues, too.
[34] Political science in Hungary has made few methodological innovations and has little methodological consciousness. Political scientists apply mainly traditional legal, historical methods in case studies, policy and institutional analysis, or philosophical and historical analysis and focus on the field of history of ideas and political philosophy. The more empirically oriented research is done by sociologists and social psychologists applying the methodologies standard in the analysis of political phenomena in the US.
[35] Transition became a major - almost the exclusive - object of study after 1989. Earlier, a very few scholars performed avant-garde work on alternatives of social and political change in Hungary and Eastern Europe, working with foreign, mainly American institutions and scholars. We may mention Elemér Hankiss (1990) and László Bruszt (with Stark, 1998), who later become part of the international transitology discourses. Other young Hungarian scholars - Ákos Róna-Tas, József Böröcz, and Árpád Szakolczai - spent longer periods abroad in graduate or postgraduate studies in the US and could join the transitology discourse at an early stage, mainly as employees of American or other Western universities. The abovementioned scholars, who gained prestige in international networks, introduced some younger scholars to the subject during their research work in Hungary, and other Hungarians cooperated with foreign institutions and scholars, so a second generation of transitologists, including András Bozóki, Zsolt Enyedi, Miklós Sükösd, Béla Greskovits, arose, later to crystallize mainly around the Central European University Political Science department. For the broader group of Hungarian political scientists, it was very important that the American Political Science Association launched some bilateral meetings of scholars in the US and in Hungary (the joint volumes of the conferences, Szoboszlai, 1991, 1992) and that the Fulbright Foundation and other US-based foundations supported the development of Hungarian political science in many ways. Important in the Hungarian transitology discourse is the outstanding scholar, Attila Ágh (1998), who maintained US connections after the bilateral association meetings. He developed the Department of Political Science of the Budapest University of Economics and Public Administration into a kind of Hungarian Center of Democracy Studies with the support of the Fulbright Foundation and of other international foundations, which launched a series of conferences after 1989 on the issues of transitions, inviting the international transitology community and issuing a series of papers in a number of series of books in English and Hungarian.
[36] Some thematic orientations with methodological implications are mentioned below.
[37] Here the research focus is on works in the specific Hungarian liberal, nationalist, and conservative political intellectual traditions, which were suppressed by the communist system. After the communist regime, leftist and especially Marxist traditions are not very popular. Anarchism, feminism, and new social movement theories have some impact, but on the whole the "left" is left out of the "mainstream" of non-Marxist, non-leftist ideologies as subjects of research in Hungary (Lánczi, 2001/a). Mainstream activity in political theory is the translation, interpretation, and "reacquisition" of Western political philosophy after four decades of isolation.
[38] A theoretically important problem that has long challenged Hungarian thinkers is the composition of the political community, because the Hungarian ethnic community includes millions of Hungarians in Western emigration and in neighboring countries like Romania, Slovakia, Croatia, Serbia, Ukraine, Slovenia, and even Austria. This implies a strong affinity to the theoretical problem of the "nation"; the establishment, analysis, composition, and legitimacy of "political community"; and issues of "minority vs. majority", regionalism, autonomy, ethnic minorities, and multi-culturalism.
[39] Research highlights vary in this field according to the main problems of Hungarian democracy after 1989, which challenged political science in a fruitful manner. Major topics were:
[40] Theoretical approaches are rather eclectic. There is a mainstream, old-type constitutional institutionalism connected to the framework of human rights. Behaviorist approaches dominate electoral, public opinion, mass media, and party system research. There is a connection between old and new types of historical and contemporary approaches to institutionalism. New institutionalism is linked to rational choice theory in policy research, especially in the field of European integration. The practical reason for the pursuit of research on minority problems is mentioned above.
[41] The main orientation of Hungarian political science was institutionalist and theoretical, but, since 1989, there have been attempts to introduce more pragmatic, policy-oriented methodology and orientation. Among younger scholars, there is a shift from the earlier "German-style", legal-philosophical approach toward a more "American-style", economically oriented social science.
[42] Hungary is a small East-Central European (ECE) country that never had many direct overseas socio-cultural ties. Area studies are not really developed here. The main focus, of course, is on the welfare democracies, especially in Western Europe, and on EU accession. Thus, the Pacific, Asia, Africa, and Australia are not really integrated in political science research. The main focus is on the ECE area itself and on Europe as a "moving target" of EU accession. This limited focus characterizes both international and comparative approaches. Of course, there is teaching on international organizations in the form of international law and international relations studies. Special attention is paid to the issues of regionalism, minorities, and autonomy. Globalization studies are an upcoming, but rather weakly developed field in Hungarian political science. One of the reasons for its weakness is the dominance of "transitology interest", which overstresses self-reflectiveness in the post-communist countries. Inner-area comparison is also a rare product. Impending EU accession has increased interest in other ECE countries. But interest in neighboring countries with larger Hungarian minorities is stable. Issues of minority rights, territorial and personal autonomy, regional cooperation, and Europeanization as a process integrating semi-sovereign nation-states in a new political community are very popular subjects in Hungarian political science.
[43] A major in political science was first established at University of Miskolc in the Faculty of Letters/Philology in 1993. The curriculum was established by Béla Pokol (successors: István Balogh, Sándor Kovács, and at present László Kürti), who, at that time, was dean of the institute, but later left the faculty. The first diplomas were awarded in 1998. The second major was established in 1997 at the Budapest Eötvös Loránd University, Faculty of State and Law, headed by Mihály Bihari (1985-1999) and continued by Máté Szabó. Its first main diploma output was in 2002. In 2001, the first university-based Political Science Department was established here; it offers MA and PhD courses and has the right to award the "habilitation". At the same university, ELTE in 1995, József Bayer established an MA program at the Faculty of Letters/Philology as well; his successor István Vida established another in 2001 at the new Faculty of Social Sciences. István Hülvely began a major program at the Faculty of Letters/Philology at the University of Debrecen in 1997. At the University of Pécs, a major program was opened in 1999 at the Faculty of Letters/Philology, headed by Márta Kunszt. At the Budapest University of Economics and Public Administration, the department led by Attila Ágh (1989-) organized a political science minor curriculum for students with another major in economics, international relations, or sociology. This type of secondary diploma teaching started early in 1986 at the ELTE Faculty of State and Law, headed by Mihály Bihari. There is a bigger department at the University of Szeged, headed by Péter Paczolay, and there are two departments at the University of Pécs (György Andrási, Faculty of Law
