Based on unprecedented access to information, Government and Politics in Hungary provides not only a historical overview but also an analysis of the main political actors, constitution, electoral system, parliament and political parties of Hungary.This timely and detailed analysis contains a wealth of important data which serves two major objectives. The first is to survey the most important institutions of the political and governmental systems and the cultural and behavioural characteristics of Hungarian politics. The second, is to provide the reader with a clear understanding of the two-way relationship between cultural-behavioural and constitutional-institutional levels of politics in Hungary. The book challenges many stereotypes of post-communist political literature and reveals why Hungarian politics does not fit into many of the generalizations and 'pigeon holes' of contemporary political science.

Parliament and the Political System in Hungary - Sources for Parliamentary History in 19th century Hungary - Parliamentary Election Results in Eastern Hungary and Transylvania - Members of Parliament and Opposing Candidates - Electoral Geography and Electoral Statistics

Legislators are entrusted with key parliamentary functions and are important figures in the decision-making process. Their behaviour as political elites is as much responsible for the failures and successes of the new democracies as their institutional designs and constitutional reforms. This book provides a comparative examination of representative elites and their role in democratic development in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). It argues that as the drivers of the transformation process in CEE, individual and collective parliamentary actors matter. The authors provide an in-depth analysis of representatives from eleven national parliaments and explore country-specific features of recruitment and representation. They draw on an integrated dataset of parliamentary elites for individual, party family, and parliamentary variables over the 20 years following the collapse of Communism and develop a common framework for the analysis of variations in democratisation and political professionalisation between parliaments and political parties/party families across CEE. This unique volume will be of interest to students and scholars of comparative politics, elite research, post-communist politics, democratisation, legislative studies, and parliamentary representation.

Having won a two-third majority in Parliament at the 2010 elections, the Hungarian political party Fidesz removed many of the institutional obstacles of exerting power. Just like the party, the state itself was placed under the control of a single individual, who since then has applied the techniques used within his party to enforce submission and obedience onto society as a whole. In a new approach the author characterizes the system as the ?organized over-world?, the ?state employing mafia methods? and the ?adopted political family', applying these categories not as metaphors but elements of a coherent conceptual framework. The actions of the post-communist mafia state model are closely aligned with the interests of power and wealth concentrated in the hands of a small group of insiders. While the traditional mafia channeled wealth and economic players into its spheres of influence by means of direct coercion, the mafia state does the same by means of parliamentary legislation, legal prosecution, tax authority, police forces and secret service. The innovative conceptual framework of the book is important and timely not only for Hungary, but also for other post-communist countries subjected to autocratic rules. ÿ