The Hungarian Agendas Project

Abstract

The chapter presents the Hungarian Comparative Agendas Project. It delineates its origins at the Centre for Social Sciences, Hungarian Academy of Sciences and situates it in the context of Hungarian political science. The project developed numerous databases, including those on budgets, laws, decrees, parliamentary speeches, newspaper articles, and public opinion polls. Due to the post-communist political development of Hungary our country project shows some specificities vis-à-vis more established projects. First, the codebook includes a few country-specific minor topic codes (such as those related to post-communist restitution) that are directly linked in to the comparative codebook (therefore our results remain fully comparable). Second, one added value of some of our datasets is their relative length which—in some cases—covers multiple centuries as well as various political regimes, including non-democratic ones. This allows for not only cross-country comparative analysis but also for comparing policy agendas in different regimes.