Authors of the best publications of our institutes are acknowledged each year. On 13 March, Zsolt Boda, General Director, handed out the awards at the annual meeting of the Centre for Social Sciences, followed by brief presentations of the research findings.
The publications and their authors awarded are the following:
Attila Papp Z. and Eszter Kovács, Institute for Minority Studies
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The paper outlines the functioning of Hungarian weekend schools in the United Kingdom, which are key institutions in emerging diaspora communities. The paper interprets Hungarian weekend schools in two paradigms: it approaches them as diaspora institutions, and also as Anglo-Saxon supplementary schools. One of the paper’s main conclusions is that, in addition to the manifest functions of Hungarian weekend schools (e.g., preservation of national identity, mother-tongue education, community engagement), latent functions are also essential, such as the psychological need of belonging to a community, the support of children’s educational attitudes, the consciousness of bilingualism, the enhancement of social capital, and integration into the host community.
János Fiala-Butora, Institute for Legal Studies
This article explores how the European Court of Human Rights has applied the norms of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) in the area of mental health law. The European Court was initially receptive to the CRPD, including the abolition of involuntary psychiatric hospitalisation, but later distanced itself from it. The article argues that the root causes of this divergence are deeper than a misunderstanding over the nature of disability; they stem from these two treaty bodies' different jurisprudential methodology and their different assumptions about their role and the role of medical and legal professionals in securing the rights of persons with disabilities.
Gergő Medve-Bálint, Institute for Political Studies
Although economic nationalist governments in East Central Europe (ECE) have strongly challenged the region’s dependence on foreign direct investment (FDI), FDI-led growth has remained stable. The political economy literature explains this puzzle by pointing to enduring business-state elite interactions and the disciplining role of the EU. In contrast, we argue that the EU’s regional investment aid rules, which grant central governments in relatively less developed member states considerable policy space, serve as the primary mechanism for reinforcing FDI dependence. Using a unique dataset on regional investment aid granted in the Visegrád countries (V4) between 2004 and 2022, we show that governments—regardless of ideological orientation—allocated the vast majority of this aid to foreign firms. Moreover, despite their nationalist rhetoric, economic nationalist governments in Hungary and Poland granted more aid to foreign firms than their non-nationalist counterparts. This suggests that these governments used this transnational policy tool instrumentally: as their political isolation within the EU grew, they increasingly promoted foreign firms to secure continued inflows of foreign capital, which provided both domestic and international legitimacy.
Máté Zombory, Institute for Sociology
The article gives a critical assessment of Michael Rothberg’s theory of “multidirectional memory”. It argues that the politico-ethical framework of solidarity he developed to overcome the “competition paradigm” of contemporary memory ultimately fails because of its underlying social ontology and presentist-ahistorical method of interpretation. The paper shows that the direct theoretical link between memory and solidarity is the outcome of a de-politicization of the historical record. Ultimately, the paper makes a case for Leftist-antifascist internationalism, a paradigm Rothberg misidentified as multidirectional Holocaust memory.
Dorottya Kisfalusi and Tamás Keller, Computational Social Science Research Group
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This study examines discrimination in teacher assessments and upper secondary track recommendations against Roma minority students in Hungary. In a pre-registered experiment, we did not find ethnic discrimination in test evaluations, but, on average, Roma students received lower track recommendations than non-Roma students. Moreover, contextual factors influenced teacher behavior: teachers who evaluated tests with a higher proportion of Roma names were more likely to recommend the non-academic secondary track for non-Roma students than those who evaluated tests with fewer Roma names. These results suggest that the ethnic composition of the evaluated student group shapes teachers’ perceptions, potentially triggering assumptions about segregated schooling environments.
Márta Kiss, Child Opportunities Research Group
In our article, we examine the situation of social enterprises, including social cooperatives, in Hungary. Our main research question is how these organisations aiming at the labour market integration of disadvantaged workers can reconcile their social mission with the challenges of economic efficiency and competitiveness. Through analysing questionnaire data and interviews, we identify their operating mechanisms and tools and the obstacles they face in their activities. Our results show that several substantive operational mechanisms and instruments support the integration of disadvantaged workers, such as mentoring, social incentives, local value creation; however, we also identify many barriers that hamper their economically efficient functioning, such as high turnover, excessive heterogeneity of products and services, or lack of bridging links.