This study ties in with the debate that exists between the representatives of critical theory in education (Apple, Lubienski, Brewer) and sociologists of education (Aurini, Davies) about the place and significance of homeschooling within the framework of the neoliberal governance of education. While the first group sees homeschooling as a direct tool of neoliberal governance, the second group finds the position of homeschooling within the framework of neoliberal governance unconvincing. Both types of arguments are examined in relation to the situation, forms and reasons for homeschooling in the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic, where interviews were conducted with groups of homeschooling parents. The arguments about the development of homeschooling as a privatised but not necessarily neoliberalised form of education are particularly valid in the context of the Czech Republic. They are also valid in the case of a significant segment of homeschoolers in the Slovak Republic, where, however, the arguments of critical theorists of education are also valid, but for a different segment of parents - parents who adopt a religious privatist stance demonstrate a degree of affinity with the neoliberal educational ethos.
The aim of our study is to present how models of social integration and disintegration relate to the stratification models of a society and its inequalities. We argue that although the traditional approaches of research to social stratification have proved to be suitable for describing certain trends in post-transition transformations in Central and Eastern Europe, as a result of the social changes of the last quarter-century and the related new intellectual tasks, it is now necessary to establish new models focusing on social integration rather than just update stratification models based on occupation, consumption or the different types of capital. In our study, we present this new line of thinking through the example of Hungarian society. To prove the benefits of a model based on the logic of social integration, we examine the differences between social integration and social inequalities/stratification models. The results show that in terms of criterion validity, the integration model performs better in most respects than we have experienced with other models.
This article focuses on experiences of private preschool operators (with varying sizes and profiles) of the governance and organisation of ECEC delivery in Sweden. The aim is to analyse how these private providers relate to, interact with and perceive their relationships with municipal authorities. These private-public governing relationships are analysed by paying particular attention to their affective dimensions through the notion of ‘market care’. The empirical data consists of interviews with 20 private preschool providers, which are analysed through a two-dimensional grid where predictability and conflict serve as analytical focal points. The findings highlight how experiences and perceptions are enabled, provoked and felt differently depending on their embeddedness in diverse local ‘affective atmospheres’. Moreover, they show that interpersonal exchanges and relationships play important roles in the performance and experience of market care. The study contributes empirical insights into the role of local affective atmospheres and market care (or lack thereof) in local Swedish ECEC governance and delivery. It thereby illuminates central aspects of the governance of privatised ECEC that complements the predominantly national and state-focused literature on quasi-market organisation.
This article explores how increasingly privatised primary education is experienced by Roma parents in a Hungarian small town, Akácos. Through the investigation of the town’s primary schooling system, this piece opens up space for an inquiry into the ways the boundaries of public and private are being redrawn by local and national education policy. As these rearrangements occur, the meanings of ‘deficits’ and racialisation shift, cementing education segregation into the social fabric of the town. Applying the lens of critical race theory and its focus on counter-storytelling in relation to deficit positionings, a fourfold local interpretation of the effects of privatisation arises in the context of education. Roma parents experience declining educational resources and the privatisation of schools into church-run institutions as additional material burdens, ‘loving’ segregation, the privatisation of pedagogic added value and the privatisation of blame, materialising in racial othering. Through this, the article sheds light on the complex interplay between the social production of deficits and processes of educational privatisation through the voices of Roma parents in a specific locality.
Our contribution aims to discuss the latest insights of the constitutional case law on the rights of students in private education. For this purpose, the Pridwin judgment of the Constitutional Court of South Africa was chosen, since this decision entailed considerable global resound and invigorated the discussion on the constitutional framework of private schools. Moreover, the Pridwin judgment provided a proper distinction between the rights and interests of the four main actors: students; private school management; parents of students and state authorities. Based on this analysis, we recommend prioritizing the educational rights of students. However, these should be carefully balanced with the legitimate rights and interests of other relevant stakeholders including private school management, parents of students, and state authorities. Although the fact that this topic has rarely been discussed in Central Europe, it will be demonstrated that the rise of private schooling might result in seeking similar constitutional remedies against private school managements in this region. Therefore, it would be worthwhile to integrate Central-Europe into this strand of academic scholarship.
Much scholarship has critiqued the fact that non-governmental organisations (NGOs), as a result of global neoliberalism and consequential state retreat, have become private service providers of children’s protection rights. But how can we explain the situation when neoliberal states also undergo autocratisation and take back service provision from NGOs, while at the same time preserving the privatisation to for-profit companies? This tendency, I argue, can be conceptualised as ‘selective privatisation’. To make this point, this article draws on ethnography and policy analysis and showcases how India’s national helpline for children went from being an NGO-state partnership to a fully state-controlled service. When CHILDLINE was a state-NGO partnership, its employees experienced challenges such as limited job security and advocacy restrictions, but they still considered the partnership positive in terms of its ability to influence the state’s child protection policies. In the new state-controlled set-up, however, civil society is diluted to ‘volunteers’ and ‘communities’ who, without formal organisation and funding, do not have the means to walk the difficult but useful tightrope between being implementers and advocates. Instead, they are de facto silenced. The article thus contributes to the literature on ‘changing’ civic spaces by concentrating on the roles of non-profit private service providers for children in neoliberal and autocratising India.
This paper contributes to the literature on the style of populists by focusing on the visual and textual elements of Viktor Orbán’s Facebook communication. Orbán is one of the most prominent figures associated with contemporary populism, and his 14 consecutive years in power make him a unique case for the study of the bimodal populist style. To this end, all his image-based posts (N = 492) were collected over a three-year period (2018-2020), covering campaigns, the COVID-19 crisis, and slow news (‘cucumber’) periods. The results of the quantitative visual and verbal content analyses reveal the primacy of visual content in transmitting populist signals, suggesting that Orbán’s relationship with ‘the elite’ is predominantly positive, contrary to expectations about negative populist communication about elites. Although the results indicate only moderate differences in the use of populist style elements across the three time periods, the findings suggest that visual elements are used in populist communication to convey different messages than textual ones.
The increasing emphasis on research impact in academia necessitates a deeper understanding of how early career researchers (ECRs) perceive and engage with this concept, especially through the lens of gender. This study aims to explore the gendered dimensions of research impact among ECRs in the social sciences. We conducted a comprehensive survey across over thirty countries in Europe, as well as South Africa. The methodology involved thematic analysis of survey responses, focusing on differences in attitudes towards impact, the challenges faced, and the role of gender in shaping these perceptions. Our findings reveal that while there are no significant gender differences in the conceptualization of research impact, female ECRs experience greater vulnerability due to systemic inequities in academia. These disparities affect their career trajectories and ability to generate impact. This study highlights the need for tailored support structures to address these gender-specific challenges and calls for further empirical research to validate and expand upon these initial findings.
The main role of the media is to be an information source – such as a window on the world – which forms people’s knowledge, values and attitudes. Several studies have shown that the impact of television during socialisation is unquestionable, and it continues to shape people’s perceptions later on too. If the portrayal of the labour force on television is distorted, it can not only distort in the audience’s image of the world but also alter their perceptions of their own lives and make them dissatisfied with their own social status. A great amount of foreign research has been conducted on this topic, but no such research has yet been done in Hungary. The current study examines how Hungarian fiction series portray the world of work by quantitative content analysis of all series of which the premiere was broadcast between 2015 and 2019 in the prime-time slot and gave sufficient opportunity for discovering portrayals of occupational roles. The results show that the world presented on television is more masculine and glamorous, with certain occupations significantly overrepresented, while some other occupations are neglected compared to the real world. The portrayal of characters also shows a distorted picture of society in the television world.
The article argues that the repeated use of geopolitical rhetoric by populist actors of various breeds is directly connected to the structural and conceptual affinities through which populism and geopolitics present themselves as discourses, thereby demonstrating a shared grammar of self-presentation. It relies on the available evidence from the Visegrád Four countries in order to survey identitary and technocratic populisms and the multiple ways in which they co-opt geopolitical reasoning. While the discussion of the V4 is based on previously published research, the study also zooms in on the post-2023 developments in Slovakia to present a new perspective. Examining the case of the most recent (as of 2025) democratic backsliding tendencies in the region, the paper demonstrates how local identitary populism has become (re)connected to a historically rooted ‘civilizational’ geopolitics of pan-Slavism.
In this article, we present data from a survey on the characteristics of the information society in four Central and Eastern European countries. The 25-minute representative telephone survey was conducted in Hungary, Romania, Poland and the Czech Republic. The research covers internet usage habits, actors of online trust, fear of manipulation and news consumption habits, and last but not least, general attitudes towards the internet. The four databases are available in English and the four questionnaires are available in the language of the country in which they are annexed to the article. The main variables of the database are presented in the article.
Social media plays a crucial role in online political campaigns as political parties can reach, inform, and mobilize voters through these platforms. Political campaigns share information on social media to mobilize support, and prior research shows that sharing content on social media correlates with the offline popularity of political parties. In this paper, we model the spread of political content on the internet. We start by exploring popularity and sharing behavior related to posts by Hungarian politicians on Facebook. We utilize this analysis to build an agent-based model. Within this, we test how echo chambers, homophily, and network structure affect the number of shares that contribute to information diffusion on social media. Our simulation compares spreading in different network structures and shows that preferential attachment models are not the most efficient for fostering diffusion in networks with relatively low density or when a filtering mechanism is present. Our model confirms that homophily generally has a positive effect on diffusion, especially within echo chambers. Echo chambers enhance the diffusion of political news with a limited potential audience. Furthermore, the results of our agent-based simulation indicate that homophily and echo chambers can significantly influence the spread of political content on social media, with echo chambers particularly enhancing diffusion in networks where overall diffusion is low.
This study investigates the prevalent use of fear as a political tool by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Through critical discourse analysis and automated text analytics, we analyze the State of the Nation addresses from 2010 to 2022, identifying recurring enemy images such as ‘Brussels’, ‘migrants’, ‘George Soros’, ‘Ferenc Gyurcsány’ and ‘opposition.’ National Consultations are also examined to understand fear-inducing strategies. Our findings reveal a consistent pattern of fearmongering, with enemy images aligning with key events and political contexts. By employing both qualitative and quantitative methods, this research deepens our understanding of fear’s role in shaping public perceptions and political dynamics. It sheds light on the strategic use of fear in Hungarian politics and its impact on democratic processes. Furthermore, the study highlights the implications for the construction of illiberal systems in Central and Eastern Europe. The analysis of Orbán’s discourse provides valuable insights into the manipulation of public sentiment and the consolidation of power through fear tactics. This study contributes to the broader discourse on the intersections of fear and politics, providing insight into fearmongering through official speeches.
The Sputnik News network of websites has been the subject of scholarly attention since its 2014 launch in the context of the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. In January 2022, Sputnik News websites were blocked by EU countries, thus acknowledging the network’s potential influence. Some researchers claim that Sputnik news follows the model of Soviet propaganda, while others claim its discursive patterns point towards new communication strategies. There is scarce literature on Eastern European Sputnik editions and no comparative approaches to date. This research article aims to fill that gap by employing mixed methods to study a large dataset (N=118,198) of Sputnik News headlines from the foreign news sections of three language editions – Czech, Polish, and Romanian, from January 2017 to January 2022. The main findings indicate a conflict-oriented, war journalism approach that mostly focuses on USA-Russia and the individual actors Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Furthermore, the coverage leans towards fear as the dominant affective framing, and the most frequently represented organization, NATO, is framed as a failing alliance, actively pursuing the consolidation of power or even as an aggressor.
This study examined the response of Belarusian pro-government Telegram channels to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine in its initial phase (22 February to 24 March 2022). A socio-semantic network approach was used to analyse the relationships between 21 influential pro-government channels and the concepts they disseminate. We applied a four-stage framework based on mutual citation analysis, extended hyperlink analysis, bipartite channel-concept network analysis, and inter-conceptual relations analysis. The findings indicate that Belarusian pro-government channels function as critical intermediaries between Russian media and local Lukashenka supporters. The network structure reveals two principal centres of media activity: one focusing on disseminating pro-Russian military content, and the other propagating messages supporting the Belarusian government. This distinction is also evident in the main topics discussed, which can be categorised as pro-Russian warfare, pro-Russian foreign policy, Belarusian domestic policy, and pro-Lukashenka content. Notably, the high proportion of war-related concepts within this semantic structure suggests that Russian political language has significantly influenced the network of pro-government channels, challenging the maintenance of domestic Belarusian narratives. Furthermore, anonymous channels on the network's periphery disseminate more explicitly aggressive war-related concepts, potentially operating with greater autonomy from direct government control. This study contributes to understanding information warfare dynamics in Eastern Europe during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. It provides insights into the complexities of information networks in contested political spaces by revealing how both social and semantic relations between Telegram channels shape media agendas.
In order to reduce the spread of COVID-19, citizens have been cooperating with their governments by complying with protective measures for almost two years. However, compliance with these COVID-19 measures can be imposed not only by the state, but also by citizens' own reactions to each other's protective behavior. More specifically, by reacting negatively toward others' transgression of COVID-19 measures, one can enforce social norms. Social norm enforcement can support the general level of compliance and enhance the effectiveness of COVID-19-related measures. In this paper we examine self-reported compliance and social norm enforcement related to COVID-19 measures in five European countries during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to socio-demographic characteristics, we include politics-related variables, in particular populist attitudes, and measure these in light of a latent variable analysis. We found that populist attitudes-contrary to our expectations-increase compliance with COVID-19 measures, but there was no significant relation between populist attitudes and social norm enforcement. These results can establish future research on how populist attitudes and COVID-19 behaviors interrelate.
This study is part of a doctoral dissertation that deals with the marketization of family policy in Hungary. The current system simultaneously serves selective pronatalism, the growth of inequalities and the creation of 'traditional' families. Since 2010, the state has been motivating upper-middle class families to have children, for which it provides significant amounts of state-subsidized loans. These subsidies can be applied for through banks, so they do not function as a classic social policy tool. A full presentation of all state-subsidized loans is not possible within the scope of this article, so the study focuses only on the baby-expecting loan (babav & aacute;r & oacute; hitel), introduced in 2019, as one of the tools of marketization. The article presents, based on 62 semi-structured interviews, the new situations that the marketization system confronts Hungarian families with. The interviews were conducted with people who were involved in the loan in some way (e. g.: successful borrowers, unsuccessful borrowers). The results show that, on the one hand, the general consequences of fiscalization (weakening of social rights, increasing individual responsibility, strengthening of market actors) are appearing, and on the other hand, there is a strong biopolitical pressure, which may even come from banks.
