This article addresses the concept of ‘constitutional moment’ in contemporary Israel, where an illiberal constitutionalisation process is in progress, and in Hungary, where the illiberal constitutional system has been in place since 2010. After discussing the judicial overhaul of the current Israeli government and the widespread protest movement against it, the article raises the question of whether the moment to adopt a written constitution has arrived. In Hungary, where a semi-electoral autocratic constitutional regime has been entrenched, the question is what are the perspectives on a return to a liberal democratic constitution.

Framed within discussions on how law operationalizes race and ethnicity, the authors provide a description of how anti-Semitic racially exclusionary legislation identified, classified, and operationalized the Jewry in Hungary between 1920 and 1944.

This article analyzes Hungary’s kin-state policy starting from the premise that the concept of collective narcissism most succinctly captures its emotional foundations. I look to substantiate this claim by examining at a wide range of sources on how Hungary feels toward neighboring states and show the preponderance of emotions connected to collective narcissism. The real-life consequences of collective narcissism are demonstrated through a case study of the relationship between Hungary and Ukraine before and after the Russian attack of 2022. Overall, I find that anger is the master emotion of Hungary’s kin-state policy, resulting in a lack of solidarity and characteristic self-centeredness in Hungary’s foreign policy, which cannot be explained by rational factors alone.

A stalagmite was collected in northern Hungary from the Vacska Cave, where monitoring and ventilation-based site selection had been conducted. The stalagmite covers the 10–8 ka (relative to AD 1950) period, including the so-called 8.2 ka event, and showed preceding signs of climate change that were evaluated by petrographic observations, 14C activities, Sr concentrations, and stable isotope compositions of calcite and inclusion-hosted water. Comparisons of speleothem records show that isotope peaks at ca. 8.5 ka are related to a regional climate anomaly, rather than to a continental-scale event. In accordance with regional proxy records, the 8.2 ka event was associated with a series of temperature and precipitation amount changes, starting with cooling and a reduction in the winter-to-summer precipitation ratio, and then becoming a humid and warm phase at 8.15 ka. X-ray diffraction-based crystallinity parameter (FWHM) values provided evidence for diagenetic alteration of the stable oxygen isotope compositions of inclusion waters. Nevertheless, the stable hydrogen isotope compositions of inclusion waters and the oxygen isotope values of the host calcite revealed elevated d-excess values, and therefore increased Mediterranean moisture contribution during the 8.2 ka event, which indirectly indicate the southward displacement of moisture transport from the Atlantic Ocean.

Despite a growing body of literature on the advancement of autocratic tactics and toolkits in competitive authoritarian regimes (CARs), we lack sufficient knowledge on the strategies that the opposition builds against populist-authoritarian governments. Using two top autocratizing cases – Turkey and Hungary – this article singles out ‘transnationalization’ as one such novel strategy. ‘Transnationalization’ is defined as a strategy through which opposition-led subnational executives transform local and global boundaries by consciously forming a link with the liberal-democratic world in order to expand their space for manoeuvre. Conducting a qualitative content analysis of the Istanbul and Budapest mayors' international Twitter accounts and using evidence from elite interviews with officials from Istanbul and Budapest municipalities, we demonstrate the material, symbolic and political means of this strategy and the rationalist and normative motivations behind it. By discussing the what, how and why of a transnationalization strategy, we fill an important gap in the scholarship regarding opposition strategies in CARs.

The article explores how cross-border heritage tourism is promoted in public schools to reimagine Hungary as an ethnically homogeneous nation by incorporating ethnic kin communities that live in neighboring countries. Cross-border heritage tourism has long served to establish strong ties to ethnic diaspora communities that live beyond the territorial borders of the nation-state. National borders in Central and Eastern Europe were repeatedly redrawn across ethnic groups over the twentieth century. Heritage tourism remains a key cultural and economic practice that symbolically questions current national borders and aims to increase the viability of ethnic enclave economies in countries where the given ethnic group is a minority. The article focuses on a large-scale student travel program that was launched by the Hungarian government in 2010, the year that marked the start of a brisk populist turn in Hungarian politics. The program provides funding to public school students for organized class trips to areas of neighboring countries (Romania, Slovakia, Serbia, Croatia, and Ukraine) that belonged to the Hungarian state before World War I. It shows how the Hungarian government mobilizes the public education system to foster a narrow and exclusionary ethnic understanding of cultural membership by selectively overemphasizing Hungarian heritage in regions that have had multi-ethnic, multi-religious, and multicultural histories for centuries. This project extends research on identity-based heritage tourism to show how it has become an integral part of the propaganda toolkit of populist governments.

Growing fiscal challenges and ageing populations have made pension reform a pressing issue. Two particularly salient areas of pension reform have been: raising the retirement age; and structural reforms like the adoption and reversal of pension privatisation. The authors compare two very similar cases: Russia and Hungary in the post-communist period. Both countries faced growing demographic and fiscal challenges prompting pension reform, but at the time of reform Hungary was democratic and Russia was authoritarian. Some scholars predicted that authoritarian governments would be better able than democratic ones at enacting unpopular, but arguably necessary, economic reforms. Others argue that democratic governments can more easily enact policy changes because of greater confidence about public opinion. Additionally, authoritarian policymaking can be uniquely slowed by bureaucratic in-fighting. The authors find support for the position that democratic governments can be more flexible: thus offering important insight into how regime type shapes policymaking.

During the early 2000s governments in Russia, Poland and Hungary declared demographic crises and adopted pro-natalist programmes to increase fertility, as well as policies to support families with children. Our article compares their ‘flagship’ pro-natalist programmes: Russia’s Maternity Capital, Poland’s Family 500+, and Hungary’s enhanced earned income tax credit, all framed by governments’ neo-familialist discourses. We confirm these policies had limited impacts on fertility, finding that their most significant and disparate effects were instead on childhood poverty. Provision of preschool public childcare and parental leaves with levels of mothers’ employment across the cases were compared. We find no relationship between coverage of childcare institutions and employment rates of mothers with young children. Data show a weak relationship between length and compensation for parental leaves and maternal employment. We conclude that post-communist governments’ flagship pro-natalist incentives, family policies and traditionalist rhetoric have had limited effects in reversing demographic decline or in re-traditionalising contemporary women’s lives.

Scholars have treated images from the golden age of Transylvanian photography, recently elevated to prominence through the digitization of archives, as “authentic” portrayals of peasant culture. However, Hungarian, Romanian, and Saxon nationalists in Transylvania utilized photographs to brand place and nation in the global market, as well as to make claims to territory and assert competing national hierarchies. I examine here Saxon historian, folklorist and travel writer Emil Sigerus’ Durch Siebenbürgen: eine Touristenfahrt in 58 Bildern (Through Transylvania: a Tourist Trip in 58 Pictures), published repeatedly between 1905 and 1929. Sigerus’ photographic survey of Transylvania’s natural landscape, built environment and diverse populations branded Transylvania in general and Transylvanian Saxons in particular as a tourist destination unspoiled by the passage of time. Sigerus also projected an ethnically stratified social hierarchy on Transylvania’s heterogeneous population, with Saxons at the apex; asserted Saxon ownership of urban centers, thereby reinforcing Saxon claims to a “civilizing mission” in Transylvania; and laid claim to territory, simultaneously redirecting tourism from other parts of Transylvania to Saxon nationalists’ benefit. By careful curation, then, Sigerus projected a strong nationalist message often overlooked in the analysis of individual images as “objective” sources of evidence.

This article constitutes a critique of abstraction as an analytic tool. The argument advances the idea that formalizing practices are indexical; that is, the way abstractions are realized necessarily incorporates features of the context in which they are produced. The expression formalizing practices refers to a series of actions or operations that make quantification, rationalization, and standardization possible. Entailed in all these procedures is an attempt to select and isolate features that exemplify a specific phenomenon or social process, or in the case of standardization, that stipulate its contours and dimensions. These features are presumed to be immanent from the start, but in fact, formal representations are carefully crafted, finely tuned instruments. In order to clarify these practices, I delineate three phases of their construction: the conceptual phrase, the choice of analytic strategy, and the specification of its formal representation. In other words, this approach suggests the value of examining formalizing projects as crucibles where cultural assumptions and practical reasoning are condensed into formulae. These ideas are explored in relation to the use of time and motion studies employed in early socialist Hungary to determine the new socialist wage system. While a decidedly local story, the implications of the analysis are much broader. The possibility of adopting this approach to the study of other formalizing practices, such as algorithmic systems and digital databases, is suggested. The analysis also raises questions about the commensurability of long-held concepts in social theory.

Treatment-resistant depression (TRD) is associated with poor quality of life, elevated morbidity and mortality and high economic burden.Our observational retrospective epidemiological study have estimated the rate of patients with TRD within a cohort of major depressive disorder (MDD) patients in Hungary and examine the comorbidities and mortality of patients with and without TRD.Our study included patients with MDD who experienced new onset of depressive episode and received antidepressant prescription between 01 January 2009 and 31 August 2015, using data from nationwide, longitudinal database. A patient was considered to have TRD if two different antidepressant treatments had failed during a given pharmacologically treated periode.Overall, 99,531 MDD patients were included, of which 8,268 (8,3%) met the criteria of TRD. Patients with TRD had significantly higher rate of having “Neurotic, stress-related and somatoform disorders”, autoimmune disorders, cardio-or cerebrovascular diseases, thyroid disorders and suicide attempts than non-TRD patients (for all comparisons, p < 0,005).Ths first study to assess the frequency of TRD in Hungary have found that the proportion of TRD is in the same range as in studies with similar methodology reported form other countries. The majority of our other main findings are also in line with previous studies from other countries.