Sorozatok

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).

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.

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.

Young people were affected disproportionately by the crisis facing the economies of the European Union in 2008–09 and they had to tackle difficulties during the ensuing lengthy stagnation (Eurofound, 2012; O’Reilly et al., 2015). The economic crisis and the period thereafter had serious consequences for youth: the proportion of the poor increased in the young age group and the differences in income between younger and older adults also increased. Nevertheless, the signs of the economic crisis diminished in the middle of the decade, and the economies of most of the EU countries started to grow again, while unemployment started to decline. This chapter aims at briefly presenting the labour market and income situation of young people in the countries of the EU in the period since the economic crisis. The impact of the recession on the labour market chances and incomes of young people differed not only across countries, but also across social groups. Family background determines how vulnerable young people are in a period of economic crisis and how they are able to tackle the consequences of recession. By passing down material, cultural and network capital, families influence the life chances of their children. Young people with few inherited resources tend to enter the labour market with lower qualifications and lower skill levels, and they are less likely to possess the information and connections needed for success. For them, the threat of long-term unemployment partly results from the conditions they inherited. In addition, family can alleviate the detrimental effects of the crisis by helping children with material and/or nonmaterial transfers. Accordingly, the chapter will also cover the inequalities of opportunities among young people to tackle the economic crisis, describing the impact of family background on educational attainment and labour market outcomes. It is primarily the 15–24 and 15–29 age groups that will be analysed. This age includes obtaining qualifications and entry to the labour market. In some cases, we raised the upper limit to 34, since difficulties in labour market integration also affect people in their early thirties because of the longer time spent in education.

Issues of foreign policy are traditionally treated as marginal in Hungarian political discourses. A good indicator of how little interest foreign policy is-sues generate is the low rate of familiarity with the names of European leaders, even in comparison to other countries in the region (see for example: Globsec, 2018). But Russia is clearly an exception to this rule. The strengthening Russian–Hungarian relationship – in line with the ‘opening up to the East’ policy of the post-2010 Orbán cabinets – has deeply divided Hungarian politics and Hungarian public opinion. Russia’s higher profile in the Hungarian mind is partly a consequence of the crisis in Crimea and Russian aggression toward Ukraine. Still, interestingly, since the annexation of Crimea – and despite the unfavourable historical experiences of Hungarians with Russia – there has been a decline in Hungarians’ threat perception towards Russia. While it is a commonplace that public opinion is primarily shaped by historical experience, this chapter will argue - based on the experiences from Hungary, where government has a dominant role in the public space – that political rhetoric can overwrite the impact of historical experiences. 1 The reason is that foreign policy is very distant from the day-to-day experiences of ordinary people, and this fact offers great scope for shaping public opinion. Of course, it is not so everywhere: there are countries where the scope for reshaping public opinion is more limited, when it comes to Russia, what happened in Hungary could not occur in Poland, for example, partly because of the historical experience of the Poles towards Russia, but more importantly, due to the higher level of political pluralism and lower level of media centralization in the country. Namely: a political force that was highly critical of Russia comes to power and promptly does a U-turn, outdoing the pro-Russian stance of the previous Gyurcsány-cabinets (2005-2010), which it had previously criticized for its sympathy to-wards Russia. The relationship with Russia, especially after the annexation of Crimea in 2014, has become a politically divisive issue not only in Hungary, but all over the Western world. In the European Parliament, it is predominantly the populist, radical right-wing and left-wing parties that support Putin’s Russia in their voting, their rhetoric and their diplomatic gestures; meanwhile the mainstream centre-right, liberal, social democratic and green parties are much more restrained (Krekó et al., 2015; Krekó and Győri, 2016; Shekhovtsov, 2017). And that affects public opinion: those who vote for populist right-wing parties in Western Europe are much more supportive of Vladimir Putin and Russia generally (Taylor, 2017; Letterman, 2018). In the US, meanwhile, public opinion has undergone a truly dramatic change – presumably not unrelated to the (mostly rhetorical) friendly gestures of President Trump to-ward Russia and Vladimir Putin, and to the fact that Russia interfered in the 2016 US presidential elections on Donald Trump’s side, and against Hillary Clinton. The traditionally hawkish Republican electorate now regards Russia as much less of a threat; meanwhile the Democrats – generally the doves in this respect –r keeps a bigger distance from Russia now (Bialik, 2018). Thus, on this question, the two electorates practically swapped places.

The eighth parliamentary elections since the 1988–90 regime change were held in Hungary on 8 April 2018. In a development probably without historical parallel in any sizeable democracy, the same party, Fidesz, won two thirds of the seats for the third time in a row in a national election. This achievement is lessened somewhat by the fact that this perennial winner is formally an alliance of two parties; but one of the two, the Christian Democrats (KDNP), has had no noticeable popular support on its own for the last 15 years or so. To put these Hungarian results into context: in the past 200 years, a single party has only twice obtained two thirds of the seats in a British general election, while such a majority has never been recorded in Germany, Italy or Japan, despite the enduring dominance of a single party (or party alliance) in all these countries in the years since the Second World War. Such a thing has never occurred in any of those free, competitive elections held since 1990 in the former communist countries – not even in tiny Montenegro, which has been governed by the same party since 1990. The practical importance of this exceptional result is further heightened by the fact that in Hungary a two-thirds majority in the only chamber of parliament means that any law can be changed – and any clause of the constitution amended – by a one-off decision. In this sense, the 2018 Hungarian parliamentary elections have given unlimited power to a single party for a third time. As Figure 1 shows, it is unusual, but not unheard-of, for a single party to receive around 50 per cent of the vote in a free and fair election – the Maltese Labour Party, quite exceptionally, gained 55 per cent of the popular vote in 2017. But it is only in authoritarian regimes that we are ever likely to find one party winning two thirds of the seats. Single parties in government are even less able to change constitutional rules: the only democracies that have a population of over half a million and still let a single legislative house change constitutional rules on its own are found where that chamber is elected under proportional representation. This raises the inevitable question about the democratic nature of Hungary’s political system. I will not devote space to this question here, because many observers have already noted the partisan bias in the electoral rules, media coverage and oversight bodies, and the extreme inequity in the public resources committed to the election campaigns of the various parties (e.g. OSCE/ODIHR, 2018).

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.

The status of the rule of law (hereafter RoL) has been steadily deteriorating in Hungary. This has come about via a number of minor steps that demonstrate a clear downward trend.1 The individual steps have been documented in detail not only in the legal literature (e.g. Jakab, 2011; Sonnevend et al., 2015), but also in the international press dealing with Hungary. However, the extent of the deterioration has often been unclear, with even experts sometimes disagreeing.2 This is due to a number of factors, the most important probably being that experts in the field are normally lawyers, who are usually untrained in quantitative methods. Traditional (qualitative) lawyerly methods are generally a reliable means of establishing whether a certain measure is in breach of the RoL. However, lawyers are not familiar with gauging the extent to which the RoL has deteriorated in a country. Another epistemological problem is that lawyers normally concentrate on the analysis of formal legal rules. But the nub of the problem in Hungary is precisely that the formal legal rules and the reality are increasingly growing apart, with changes taking place much more frequently in actual practices than in the formal legal rules (Jakab and Gajduschek, 2016). Such a situation may be comprehensively summed up by so-called ‘RoL indices’ that capture various details in a single indicator; more importantly, these give due consideration to actual practice.3 Such indices clearly reflect the erosion of the RoL in Hungary that has taken place in recent years and that (we have every reason to believe) will continue. In this chapter, we briefly present the values of two indices: (a) the RoL sub-index of the Bertelsmann Transformation Index and (b) the World Justice Project’s RoL Index. Within the Bertelsmann Transformation Index, the so-called ‘status index’ is the average of the democracy index (which includes an RoL sub-index) and the market economy index. Figure 1 clearly shows a gradual erosion of the RoL in Hungary. The management index, meanwhile, reflects the efficiency of government. It also shows a downward trend – that is, the erosion of the RoL has not boosted efficiency.

Outward migration from today’s Hungary is a fact: it is one of the most worrying social problems, and although its extent is difficult to measure, it has been visibly increasing since 2010–11. Early in the decade, growing signs prompted a question in the Social Report about whether Hungary was following the regional trend in outward migration; by the middle of the decade the answer was clear (Hárs, 2012; 2016). Future trends can only be guessed at. For a long time, outward migration from Hungary was less pronounced than from most of the region’s countries and its structure was rather different; thus its impact and implications are not yet known. This chapter investigates where Hungary stands in the growing tendency toward outward migration from the Eastern European region and looks at its specific features and its impact on the labour market.

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.