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Az elmúlt évtizedben azonban a társadalomtudományokban egyre nagyobb figyelmet fordítanak a vagyoneloszlásra. A rugalmas munkaerőpiacok, a gyengülő jóléti államok és a gazdasági válságok idején egyre inkább felértékelődik a vagyon szerepe. Ebben a tanulmányban az anyagi transzferek (öröklés, ajándékozás) szerepét elemeztük a magyarországi vagyongyarapodásban európai összehasonlításban csaknem három évtizeddel a piacgazdasági átmenet után, az Európai Központi Bank 2017-es Household Finances and Consumption Survey felmérésének adatai alapján. Eredményeink szerint az örökség és a kapott ajándék hét százalékponttal növeli a felső vagyoni kvintilisbe kerülés esélyét Magyarországon (ceteris paribus), ami a leggyengébb hatás az elemzésbe bevont EU-országok közül. Összességében az eredmények arra utalnak, hogy a vagyonátruházások hozzájárulnak a magyarországi vagyonteremtéshez, de a hatás más európai országokban tapasztaltnál gyengébb. Úgy tűnik, hogy még három évtizeddel a piacgazdaságra való áttérés után sem a generációk közötti vagyonátadás a háztartások vagyonfelhalmozását elősegítő fő csatorna. Ennek oka az lehet, hogy mivel a vagyonfelhalmozás a posztszocialista országokban csak körülbelül egy generációval ezelőtt kezdődött, a vagyontranszferek hatása még kevésbé látható.

The main economic and social indicators show a basically favourable environment emerging in Hungary over the past few years, with persistently low unemployment, growing GDP, rising real income and very low (or even zero) inflation during most of the decade in focus (Kopint-TÁRKI, 2018). The share of those living in poverty or exclusion has decreased, and all three components of this indicator (the share of those living in households with income poverty, severe material deprivation and low work intensity) has also shrunk (Bernát and Gábos, 2018). But does this progress, which describes general trends in society, also affect the traditionally most disadvantaged Hungarian social group – the Roma? The issue of how to overcome the disadvantages faced by Eastern European Roma (among them Hungarian Roma) has been discussed for over a century; over that time, the process may be seen as a series of forward and backward steps (Dupcsik, 2009). However, over the past decade, the process has rather resembled a roller-coaster, as described in the monitoring study by Bernát and Gábos (2018), on which this chapter is based.1 Most of the data used were collected by the Hungarian Central Statistical Office (HCSO): the Hungarian waves of such large-scale European surveys as the EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) and the Labour Force Survey (LFS), which since 2013–14 have also provided information on ethnic background.2 These ethnic identity questions supplement the general EU-SILC and LFS surveys in Hungary (i.e. they are not part of the general European EUSILC and LFS datasets) and make a Roma versus non-Roma comparison possible within a large-sample, representative survey. Moreover, thanks to the Second European Union Minorities and Discrimination Survey (EU-MIDIS II) conducted by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), it is also possible to place the situation of Hungarian Roma within a European context. This study presents the process of Roma integration during the 2010s through those social policy indicators that link to the areas of interventions by the European and Hungarian Roma Strategies. 3 The Hungarian National Social Integration Strategy (hereafter: ‘the Strategy’; see NTFS, 2011; MNTFS II, 2014) lists the social policy aims in order of importance: first of all, reducing the share of those living in poverty and exclusion, with a special focus on the Roma population; followed by preventing the reproduction of poverty and social exclusion, improving equal access to socio-economic goods and strengthening social cohesion. This chapter presents the progress made in achieving these aims, as reflected in the rate of those living in poverty or social exclusion and the main employment and education indicators.

Hungary has participated in international educational surveys from the very beginning in the 1970s, and so changes in educational achievement may be analysed over several decades. In this chapter, we first review changes in educational outcomes and compare them to results from other countries. In the second part, we explore data that indicate crucial educational issues in the social context, highlighting the weak contribution that education makes to reducing social inequalities and improving the job-market prospects of children in disadvantaged social groups.

This study presents the changes in the housing sector since 2000 in four steps. First, we evaluate the Hungarian housing situation in an international comparative context, looking for the connection between economic development and the housing consumption level of households. Then we divide the years after 2000 into three periods, in order to analyse macro-level developments related to the housing system (construction, house prices, transactions and so forth). Next, we separately examine developments in the housing situation of different social strata over the past 15 years. And finally, we take a look at recent housing market trends, which show signs of a post-crisis recovery, but at the same time indicate the re-emergence of pre-crisis problems.

The aim of this chapter is to investigate public opinion on migration generally, and more specifically attitudes toward asylum seekers during the migration crisis affecting Europe. The time frame of our analysis is 2014 to 2018, as we analyse the public attitudes of Hungarian and European citizens before, during and after the peak of the migration crisis. The structure is as follows: first, international longitudinal data will be presented, drawing on European comparative surveys during 2014–18; secondly, we focus our attention on the so-called Visegrád countries and the joint research that took place in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary (the V4 countries) between August and October 2015. Thirdly, we zoom in on the Hungarian data related to asylum seekers arriving from different source countries and analyse the social basis of the migration-related question. Finally, we summarize our results.

Most studies on trust, and especially trust in institutions, express concern about the declining (or at best stagnating) trends of public confidence in government, the EU and other institutions (such as the law, the courts or the police). Recent decades have been characterized by observers as a period of ‘crisis of trust’ in European societies (see e.g. Hosking, 2017). The erosion of trust is worrisome because it may signal legitimacy problems and a declining willingness on the part of citizens to cooperate with state institutions. This may bring about a radicalization of politics or a weakening of law-abiding attitudes (Boda, 2013). The economic crisis of 2007–09 had a clear and negative effect on trust; and since confidence in the EU has been particularly affected, the supporters of the European project have expressed some fear concerning the future of the European Union. Our chapter analyses the trends of institutional trust in Europe using data from the Eurobarometer (European Commission, 2007–16) and the European Quality of Life Survey (Eurofound, 2018b). We build on our research done for Eurofound (Eurofound, 2018a), but this paper focuses more on Hungary. One of our conclusions is that in the past few years trust in institutions has been slowly increasing in the countries of the EU. This offers a glimmer of hope, because it suggests that the crisis of trust is not irreversible.

The population development of a country depends on three components: births increase the population size; deaths decrease it; and migration can increase it or de-crease it, depending on whether there are more immigrants or emigrants. These three components are shaped by very different mechanisms, which in modern societies are only loosely related. Thus, when we discuss population trends, we need to examine and understand the development of each component separately, before linking them together to arrive at a single figure for the population. This overview analyses the development of the first two components – births and deaths; migration is discussed in a separate study (Blaskó, Ligeti and Sik 2014).1 However, the implications of migration will be highlighted briefly in the section on ‘age distribution and ageing’, towards the end of this chapter. This is a classical approach, since the definition of natural population change refers to the balance of births and deaths; however, the increasing contribution of migration to the size and age composition of the population, especially in modern societies, is also widely acknowledged and cannot be ignored. The population of Hungary was 10,588,614 on 1 January 1989; three decades later, on 1 January 2018, it was 9,778,371 – a difference of over 800,000. If we consider the number of births and deaths between the start of 1989 and the end of 2017, it becomes obvious that the underlying changes were even more fundamental. In 2017, there were more than 30,000 fewer births and about 13,000 fewer deaths than in 1989. In the whole period under consideration, close to a million more people died than were born; the only reason why the population did not decline accordingly was that net migration until 2010 was clearly positive (more immigration than emigration). However, net migration changed recently, and therefore today migration also contributes to population decline (Cf. Gödri, 2015; Hárs in this volume).

Poverty has various definitions and, accordingly, several indicators that serve to operationalize those definitions (see e.g. Boarini and d’Ercole, 2006).1 For example, as defined by the European Union, the poor are ‘individuals whose resources are so limited as to exclude them from the minimal acceptable way of life of the Member State in which they live’ (European Council, 1975: 36). The EU’s poverty definition thus contains both outcome (exclusion from the minimal acceptable way of life) and resource (lack of resources) elements (Fusco et al., 2010). In order to monitor the poverty reduction target, the EU2020 Strategy identified a composite indicator. Based on that, people living in poverty or social exclusion are defined as those who are poor in terms of relative income, are materially deprived, or who live in households with low work intensity. In the poverty and social exclusion indicator of the EU2020 Strategy, income poverty is related to the ‘resource’ element and material deprivation to the ‘outcome’ element of the definition. 2 TÁRKI Social Research Institute has been regularly publishing reports on the trends in poverty in Hungary for more than 25 years, using a set of indicators that has been widely accepted and used in international comparative analyses. Initially, this data source was the Hungarian Household Panel (e.g. Spéder, 1998); since 2001, it has been the TÁRKI Household Monitor Survey (Gábos and Szivós, 2010; Gábos et al., 2013; 2015). In the second half of the 2000s, due to the monitoring processes arising from Hungary’s EU membership, the publications came to include indicators of other poverty approaches (e.g. material deprivation, low work intensity), as well as relative income poverty measures. Also, in order to provide an international context, the publication was supplemented with data from the EU-SILC (European Statistics on Income and Living Conditions) survey coordinated by Eurostat. The present study aims at continuing this tradition, this time relying entirely on calculations based on the EU-SILC database. It includes annual cross-sectional indicators of poverty and social exclusion; these snapshots are supplemented by another chapter in the volume (Branyiczki and Gábos) that studies the dynamics of poverty.

In their 2008 book Social class: How does it work? Annette Lareau and Dalton Conley lamented the fact that research into social class and social stratification did not receive enough scholarly attention. However, recently these topics have returned to the forefront of sociology. This resurgence is mostly attributable to the Great British Class Survey by Savage et al. (2013). Their work was inspired by Bourdieu, in that they identified three factors influencing social class membership: economic, structural and societal/social capital. Their findings received so much attention that the prestigious journal Sociology (3/2014) devoted a thematic issue to the commentaries generated by the study. It is indicative of the importance of Savage et al.’s (2013) publication that the Hungarian social science scene also responded quickly, and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, in cooperation with GFK, designed a well-publicized study entitled Osztálylétszám 2014 [Class enumeration 2014]; for an account in English, see Albert et al. (2017). This research used cluster analysis and differentiated between eight classes; it found a broad lower class and a very narrow upper class, with a dwindling middle class. Overall the study depicted Hungarian society as pear shaped. Yet, for the purposes of this chapter, the most important commentary on this new perspective on social class is Bradley’s (2014) neo-Weberian criticism of it. In particular, Bradley took issue with three propositions. First, unlike the mainstream understanding of social class (as defined by Goldthorpe and his colleagues), this new Bourdieusian perspective assumes that economic, cultural and societal/social capital each has a very similar influence on someone’s social position. Yet, according to Bradley, this presumption is flawed: neither cultural nor social/societal capital is independent of an individual’s economic capital, but both are, in fact, the products of it. Bradley’s second – partly methodological – criticism is that it is much easier to capture the cultural capital of the upper classes (e.g. visits to museums) than it is to tap into the lower classes’ cultural consumption (which may involve going to the pub, do-it-yourself activities, and so on). This is problematic, as it can mask the social mobility of certain members of the lower classes. For instance, talented craftspeople could conceivably increase their income and wealth by improving their residential property through their handyman skills; but that would not change their social standing, as their cultural and social capital would remain unchanged. This informs Bradley’s third and final criticism: as equal weight is given to all three sources of capital, a manual worker with the same income as a professional could seem deprived – or of a lower class – purely on the basis of other factors that affect the person’s position. In other words, despite having a relatively high income, a person could be categorized as deprived due to having low social and cultural capital. Having considered these criticisms, this chapter follows the classic neoWeberian perspective, which is in line with other previous publications on the Hungarian social class structure (see, for instance, Fábián et al., 2000; Kolosi and Dencső, 2006; Kolosi and Keller, 2010). Thus, our approach argues that a person’s occupation and employment status is the best predictor of his (or her) opportunities, prospects and position in society. However, to broaden the scope of our inquiry, as well as occupational class we also include a person’s education and other pertinent economic variables. These factors allow us to go beyond the respondent’s social class membership and help establish his social status and place in the social hierarchy, thus revealing inequality and overall social stratification (Wright, 2008; Goldthorpe, 2008). This chapter contributes to the discussion of Hungary’s social class structure in three ways. First, using data from the European Social Survey (ESS), we provide an international comparison and show how occupational classes changed between 2002 and 2012 in Hungary, compared to other countries in the region and to most EU-15 countries. Second, relying on data from the 2001 and 2012 waves of TÁRKI’s Household Monitor survey, we use latent class analysis to assess the changes in social stratification over the past decade. Finally, harnessing data from the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP), we track changes in the subjective self-image of Hungarian society between 1999 and 2009 and juxtapose the results with those of other postcommunist and Western European countries. We also consider the reasons for this self-image and speculate as to anticipated changes in future perceptions.

Social mobility studies traditionally investigate how the social status of parents affects the social status of their children. Assuming that occupation is a good indicator of social status, social mobility refers to occupational mobility – and typically to the degree of (im)mobility – by comparing a father’s occupation to that of his son.1 These studies tend to follow a normative approach: a high degree of social mobility is ‘good’; strong immobility is ‘bad’. The less parental status influences children’s social chances, the better for society. Whether it is a good thing or a bad thing, the fact is that countries tend to be judged, international comparison is crucial and countries are ranked according to the opportunities for social mobility, which is a sign of an open society. The seminal book by Erikson and Goldthorpe (1992) is basic reference for all research in social mobility, for at least two reasons. On the one hand, they study class mobility, based on the so-called ‘EGP’ class schema – following the initials of three authors: Erikson, Goldthorpe and Portocarero (1979). In their view, the EGP class schema combines the approaches taken by Marx (based on ownership) and Weber (based on marketability). In other words, class positions involve all goods and resources that stem from education, income, wealth or network connections. On the other hand, absolute and relative mobility are separated in the analysis, the latter being free of the effect of change in the class structure. This is called social fluidity and it is the chief indicator of the openness of society. Nevertheless, the investigation by Erikson and Goldthorpe (1992) is comparative in nature, and Hungarian data are also analysed. A follow-up project led to an edited volume by Breen (2004), containing a range of country studies that analyse social fluidity and apply the same class schema for the purpose.