Gabor Toka

Department of Political Science

Central European University, Budapest
The Mobilisation of Social Cleavages in Hungary in a Comparative
Perspective
I. General propositions
By now it is conventional wisdom that East European cleavage structures
are doomed to be weak. Strong cleavage mobilisation takes organisational
carriers and collective identities, over and above the political parties
themselves. Therefore the postcommunist countries, after decades of
systematic destruction and officially encouraged erosion of social pluralism
(except for the occasional promotion of ethno-linguistic identities) may have
very little of cleavage politics. Consequently, East European party politics is
likely to be even more fluid than what is usual in new democracies. Established
parties will split and decline, and new ones will emerge out of the blue with an
astonishing regularity, as politicians will - quite rightly - expect that voters have
only the shallowest of loyalties to the parties they supported previously2.
Indeed, aggregate volatility (i.e. the percentage of vote changing hands
between different parties from one election to another3) seems to be much
higher all over East Central Europe than in Italy and Germany after World War
2, or in Spain, Portugal and Greece in the 1970s and early 1980s4. The 28.3
percent net volatility between the 1990 and 1994 Hungarian elections is three
and a half times higher than the West European average between 1885 and
1985, and comparable to the very highest West European figures registered in
that period, such as the 32 and 27 percent figures produced by the first
elections in Weimar Germany5.
A scary though not necessary result of volatile elite and mass behaviour
may be the excessive fragmentation of the party system, and the consequent
difficulty of sustaining a legislative majority behind any government or
coherent policy for long. The stalemate in the fractionalised legislature will then
provide amptle justification for the expansion of presidential powers and ruling
by decree. While this scenario of curtailing democracy is not unheard of in the
former Soviet Union, it is certainly not what has been happening in Hungary in
the 1990s.
Quite the opposite, Hungarian politicians and political analysts equally
like to emphasize how much political stability their country has had since 1989
compared to other post-communist countries. While the vigour of their
reasoning may be taken as a sign that they themselves see something
unexpected or unnatural in this somewhat overstated tranquility, they seem to
have a point. No significant constitutional change occurred since May 1990, the
election law remained almost unchanged since October 19896, political
violence remained unheard of7 and political freedom well preserved8. The
number of working days lost because of industrial disputes has been among
the lowest in Europe, and not a single no-confidence motion was tabled in the
parliament. Elections have been taking place strictly on schedule in March-April
1990, May 1994, and the next one most probably in May 1998.
While it may well be unwarranted to present all this as obvious signs of
political maturity and success, this appearence of stability is conspicious
enough to call for explanation. The reason cannot be that Hungarians have

been particularly happy with their political system or their governments. Both
in 1990 and 1994 the incumbent government was comprehensively defeated at
the polls, with its former opposition winning over 90 and over 80 percent of the
seats in the new parliament, respectively (cf. Appendix 1). Comparative
surveys like the Central and Eastern Eurobarometer, the New Democracies
Barometer, and the International Social Justice Survey have always found
Hungarians among the economically and politically most dissatisfied nations in
Eastern Europe - even if not as wary of the transformation process as the
people of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine9. While 1995 was a bit special in
Hungary as the steepest decline of real wages since the transition to
democracy was registered in that year, it is nevertheless instructive to look at
table 1 that demonstrates the dramatic depth of popular disenchantment in
Hungary.
Table 1 about here
Neither do Hungarians show much deference to their political leaders. On
the one hand, the transition to democracy did not involve revolutionary
catharsis or the birth of a new state - which probably makes the absence of
hugely popular political leaders and movements more understandable. On the
other hand, non-elites appear to be perfectly able to organise on their own, if
not to sustain these efforts. In late October 1990 cab and truck drivers
organised a three-day long nationwide road blockade forcing the government
to compromise, entirely out of the blue, in just a few hours following the
announcement of an unexpected petrol price hike. In the Winter of 1992/93, a
bunch of lower class citizens established the Society of Those Living Under the
Subsistence Level (LT) and swiftly collected vastly more than the required
number of signatures to initiate a referendum (their proposed referendum
question was whether you agree to dissolve the current parliament and call
early elections, which the Constitutional Court understandably did not allow to
become the subject of a referendum).
Why, then, the Hungarian political system proved so stable (or rigid, if
you like)? There are reasons to doubt that the stability and legitimacy of the
constitutional framework was a product of developments in the party political
arena, and thus in the cleavage structure.10 Rather, the stability of
governments - given the considerable number of policy U-turns and cabinet
reshuffles, one should rather talk of the endurance of prime ministers and, to a
lesser extent, of coalitions - was probably more a result of the construcive vote
of no-confidence than anything else,11 while the dearth of economically
motivated protest and populism might be explained by a number of sociostructural features without much reference to political institutions.12
In addition, the Hungarian transition to democracy was somewhat
peculiar in that it allowed the negotiation of a comprehensive deal on
constitutional reform before the first free election.13 The resulting document
(formally an amended version of the 1949 Stalinist constitution) removed the
compelling need for a new constitution. Though none is satisfied with the
institutional framework that evolved, the lack of sufficient consensus on further
reforms of the electoral system and judicial review, the introduction of direct
presidential elections, bicameralism, or references to social rights and
corporatist intermediation in the constitution blocked the way of major

institutional changes after 1990. As the fate of a number of legislative issues

requiring a two-thirds majority and a degree of cooperation between
government and opposition made it clear, the situation is probably more a
stalemate than tranquile stability. The parliament could not pass a law on the
electronic media until December 1995, struggled to fill vacancies in the
Constitutional Court long after the constitutionally prescribed deadline, and
spectacularly failed to get any results after years of negotiations on drafting a
genuinely new constitution.
True, elite consensus almost certainly played a residual role in
democratic consolidation. While not entirely certain about each other's
compliance with the demoratic rules of the game, all parties kept endorsing
and supporting democracy.14 A broad committment to market, military and
legal reforms, with an eye on integration into the European Union and the NATO
was also shared by the six main parties and the business, media and academic
establishment.15 This consensus made the major parties extremely wary of
political instability and any mass mobilisation on socio-economic issues, and
allowed a very effective sanctioning of any deviation from this norm.16
This consensus was not perfect, but the minor disagreements over the
importance of joining the EU and the NATO, and the considerably bigger, but
ideologically not much more articulate inter-party dissensus on economic
policies did not serve as major building blocks of party identities. Previous
studies of party elites by Herbert Kitschelt and Radoslaw Markowski showed
that party positions on economic issues are less polarised, more diffuse, and
not so critical for the definition of inter-party ideological distances in Hungary
than in the Czech Republic and Poland17. Congruently with this, analyses of
mass electoral behaviour found that social status and class are less important
determinants of party preferences in Hungary than in most other East Central
European and a number of Western democracies18 (cf. Appendix 4 too).
Enlarging the sample of countries considered in these previous analyses, table
2 shows bivariate statistics on how strong the impact of such attitudes on party
preferences were in some East European countries in late 1995. The important
finding for the present paper is that attitudes on foreign and economic policy
issues apparently did not become as important determinants of party
preferences in Hungary as in most other East European countries.
Because party preference (i.e. which party the respondent would vote if
there were an election) is not a metric scale but a nominal variable, we have to
use the so-called uncertainty coefficient to measure how well we can predict
party choice on the basis of responses to other questions. This coefficient tends
to have very small numerical values even in the case of relatively strong
relationships. For instance, the impact of a social class variable (coded 1 for
blue-collar workers and 0 otherwise) on party preference was just .04 in Great
Britain
in
1990
(see
Appendix
4).
Table 2 about here
The data come from Eastern and Central Eurobarometer No. 6, in which
the respondents in the the Eastern countries aspiring for EU- and NATOmembership were asked what way they would vote in a referendum on the
entry of their country into these organisations. The responses to these two
questions are much-much better predictors of party preference in Bulgaria and
the Czech Republic than elsewhere. In other words, these are much more

divisive partisan issues for these two party systems than for others. The
explanation seems to be easy: these are the two countries among the nine in
the analysis where the (former) communist parties were the least reformed and
remained relatively orthodox during and after the transition to democracy.
Poland, Estonia, and Hungary, with their thoroughly transformed
postcommunist parties are the other extreme. There, the issue of NATO- and
EU-membership hardly differentiates between the supporters of the different
parties.
A more complicated picture emerges when we move to the approval of
the slogan of a "free market economy". This item predicts vote much better in
the unlikely group of Albania, Armenia, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic and
Macedonia than elsewhere. The cross-national differences are now less easily
explained than those on foreign policy issues. It is true that the attitude in
question seems to have the least to do with vote in Croatia, Latvia, Slovenia,
and Hungary, and none of these countries has significant orthodox communist
parties. But the Russian and Ukraianian successor parties of the CPSU strike me
as ideologically more orthodox formations than the Macedonian, Armenian, and
Albanian post-communist parties. Yet, in the first two attitudes towards the
market do not appear to have had greater impact on party preferences in 1995
than in the the south of the Balkan and Caucasus mountains. At first sight, the
same comparison seems to defy Peter Katzenstein's ingenious proposal,
namely that small countries, because of their greater trade openness, are more
constrained in their economic policy choices than big countries. Thus,
adversarial party competition on economic issues is more likely to appear in
big, and corporatist institutions in small countries19. Obviously, Albania,
Macedonia, and Armenia are small even in comparison to Hungary. Note,
however, that their trade openness may well have been lower in critical periods
of their recent political development than that of Hungary, Slovenia and the
Baltic states, indeed lower than that of Russia and Ukraine. The reasons are
Albania's protracted autarchy under Enver Hoxha, and the trade blockade
against Macedonia and Armenia by some of their neighbours, coupled with the
ongoing warfare on neighbouring territories.
Given the difficulties with evaluating the amount of unregistered foreign
trade - i.e. smuggling - across some East European borders, the formal testing
of the hypothesis is difficult. But it seems clear enough that Hungarian party
competition in the 1990s had little use for some traditional left-right issues
related to foreign and economic policy. This, in turn, can probably be explained
by two, interrelated factors: the reformist attitude of the former communist
party and the high trade openness of the country, especially towards Western
Europe.
Overall, political stability in Hungary probably benefited from the fact
that the major issues of economic transformation became a matter of partisan
controversy only to a limited extent. Yet, this factor cannot explain why the
Hungarian party system remained relatively stable. Quite the contrary, as an
analysis of Polish, Czech, Slovak and Hungarian data showed, the less strongly
related party preference is to attitudes on persistent and salient issues (such as
market reform), the easier it is for voters to move from one party to another20.
Yet, the same six parties won parliamentary representation in the 1990
and 1994 Hungarian elections which dominate the polls before the forthcoming
1998 elections. Indeed, in the public opinion polls no other party than this six
has ever passed the percentage threshold for gaining seats in the parliament

since the demise of the Social Democrats (MSZDP) before the 1990 election.
Furthermore, not only the name the major parties, but also their relative vote
share remained probably more stable in Hungary than in some of the countries
which - according to table 2 - have more, rather than less effect of economic
attitudes on the vote. Precise data on aggregate volatility from contemporary
Eastern Europe are hard to come by as the vote returns for the smaller parties
are usually not available in accessible sources. But Hungary's 28.3 percent
volatility between 1990 and 1994 was clearly less than Poland's 34 percent
between 1991 and 1993, Estonia's 54 percent net volatility between 1992 and
1995, and Lithuania's more than 40 and the Czech Republic's 31.4 percent
1992-96 volatility21.
The lack of disruption and upheaval in other elements of the political
system presumably helped the stabilisation of the party system. But this
cannot be a sufficient explanation, as the former was far less unusual in the
postcommunist world than the latter seems to have been. Rather, I would
emphasize the following factors.
First, as much as there was a difference between the stability of the
Hungarian and say the Bulgarian, Czech, Romanian or Sloven party systems,
the difference was that under the Hungarian circumstances the initial coalition
of nearly all electorally relevant anti-communist (or, in post-sultanistic
Romania, anti-Ceausescu) forces, which took the form of the Opposition
Roundtable (EKA) in Hungary, did not continue as a heterogenous and
oversized electoral alliance doomed to break up. This way Hungary "spared" at
least one organisational transformations that nearly all other East Central
European countries had to go through - as it was the case with the Popular
Fronts in the Baltic states, the Bulgarian Union of Democratic Forces (SDS), the
Czech Civic Forum (OF), the Polish Solidarnosc, the Romanian National
Salvation Front (FNS), the Slovak Public Against Violence (VPN), and the
Slovenian DEMOS.
Secondly, the parties of the Opposition Roundtable, as they gained real
influence through the national roundtable talks with the communist
establishment, and a monopoly of representing the anti-regime opiniation in
the process of transition. Thus, they attracted to themselves the best human,
organisational and material resources that were available for competitive party
politics in Hungary in 1989-90. This gave them considerable advantage over
other those parties which were founded after Spring 1989.
But this was not enough to guarantee either the electoral viability of all
parties of the EKA,22 or to prevent the entry of newcomers into the party
arena. In the 1994 election campaign two outsiders, the Agrarian Alliance (ASZ)
and the Republic Party (KP) showed evidence of electorally attractive leaders,
financial resources and grassroots organisation that must have been enough to
gain parliamentary representation - if the message was right. Yet they failed.
While other untested explanations of their failure are, of course, legion, one of
the most plausible ones is that they failed because they could not stake out a
truly unique ideological position for themselves in the Hungarian party system.
This, I believe, was due not to their lack of imagination or talent, but rather to
the nearly one-dimensional simplicity of the emerging cleavage structure, in
which their position was difficult to distinguish from that of the triumphant
MSZP and SZDSZ (on the simplicity of the cleavage structure see below). In
other words, given the already high number of parliamentary parties,

Hungary's relatively simple cleavage structure acted as a gatekeeper against

the entry of new parties.
Fourth, Hungary does have a politically mobilised cleavage line that has
some hold over the electorate and the party elites. This cleavage divides the
society into a socially more conservative, religious, somewhat more nationalist
and anticommunist camp on the one hand, and a secular, morally more
permissive, and typically less nationalist camp, which has as its major pillar the
clientele of the former communist regime and those who at least appreciate
the latter's modernising tendencies. The former wish to see the historical
injustices that occurred under communism undone, while the latter would
prefer to draw a thick line between past and present. The persistence of this
divide is increased by its being related to so many different issues. Another
major reason for its strength is that it had organisational carriers and collective
identities reinforcing it throughout the entire communist era: active
membership in churches (i.e. attendance at religious services) on the one
hand, and (pre-1989) communist party membership on the other.23 The
religious cleavage is fairly well politicised in probably all predominantly Catholic
countries of Eastern Europe (cf. Appendix 4 on the impact of church attendance
on party choice in different countries). The fact that it divides partisan camps
more strongly in Hungary than in Poland (see the same source) or
predominantly protestant Estonia may go some way to explain why Hungary
has lower electoral volatility despite a probably weaker mobilisation of socioeconomic cleavages.
Finally, there is less to be explained about the stability of the Hungarian
party system than it sometimes appear to observers. As I pointed out, voters
are not particularly loyal to their parties. Alas, some of the parties significantly
changed their identity over time. Several of them became endangered species
at one time or another, and at the time of writing the chances are that the
number of relevant parties will decrease in the 1998 elections. Just as the
simpicity of the cleavage structure may have served as a gate-keeper against
the entry of new parties, it may be unable to sustain even the six party system
as it existed between 1990 and 1998.
The formal testing of some of the above propositions would encounter
insurmountable difficulties. The most that I can achieve below is to show their
plausibility in the light of the history of the Hungarian party system.