Collegium Budapest Fellow Seminar Series
Fellow Seminar by Mihály Csákó
Exploring political socialisation in the nineties:
the Hungarian case
This lecture is based on the work I have done in the framework of a series of studies not yet completed. It started as an experimental student project in 1991 when five students proposed to explore possible impact of ties between peers on political socialisation. The sample of 1991 consisted of three classes of seventh-graders (about 13 year old) of three primary schools in Budapest. In 1994, a second exploration of the same nature in six primary schools of Budapest was sponsored by the Soros Foundation, and a third wave of data collection has been carried out on a double size sample, containing six primary schools from two further Hungarian cities beyond the six schools in Budapest, with the support of the R&D Fund for Higher Education of the Ministry of Education. The series of projects started from zero and theoretical knowledge should have been acquired parallel to empirical analysis. In 1999, some results have already been presented at the Annual Round Table Conference of the IPSA RCPSE and published next year in the Hungarian Sociological Review “Szociológiai Szemle”. [OVERHEAD: REF1] As a side-product of our work, a text book was selected, translated and published from the literature written in French [OVERHEAD: REF2] and another one, based on the English language literature is just being edited in these days. Results of the whole project are to be published soon by the same editor.
As you see, we are close to the ending – hopefully a happy ending – of this complex research series, but today I am still unable to summarise it for you. I can share some ideas and insights resulting out of this work, only.
I share with you first an important observation I made when preparing my lecture. While struggling with the scope, the contents, the form, the structure and other problems, at a certain point I understood that my lecture will not stick to the “Hungarian case” but it will consist of three parts. The first one aims at some homogenisation of the public to a certain limited extent and therefore it will explain some basic concepts of the political socialisation, important in the perspective I take. The second part will offer a short overview of the social, political and research background you may already know but it should be rearranged to our purposes. And finally the third part will only turn to some empirical results you are the most eager to know, I suppose.
I hope that I can get through all that without boring you too much.
What is political socialisation? And why do we study it?
1) Formal definition can be derived from the two words.
Socialisation is an established research field in psychology and especially in social psychology covering the process of the individual’s integration into the society. The concept developed from the idea of the impact of social actors on a quasi passive individual to the image of an interaction between two sides with unequal potential on the one hand and from the impact of grown-up persons on children and youth to a lifelong process between the individual and its social environment on the other. Still, early socialisation, that is “growing up”, remains the main interest of this field.
The adjective political refers to a particular sphere or subsystem of the society delimiting a special part of process of socialisation that integrates the individual into the political society. So, this research interest in political socialisation has developed as a branch of political science research rather than within psychology.
2)Why do we turn to such studies? One may remark that the ancient Greeks also were socialised politically – without studying this process. Of course, many normative pedagogical books have been written until our times to teach how to educate the emperor, the prince or any kind of politician or how to become an emperor, a prince or a good or at least successful politician. The authors always assumed that they know the process without describing it. So, it does not look aimless to ask for the reason of such a research.
Interest in political socialisation was born recently, in the 1950s. The factors which contributed to this development are well known today.
–It grew out of the basic question: “How and why political behaviour is changing?” This question gained particular importance in a time when national states came out of WWII stronger than ever, so politics also became more important.
–At the same time, the post war baby boom made youth a strong factor in social change, partly through the problems they presented for the educational systems and social and economic integration. It cannot be considered accidental that the sociology of education emerged as a special branch of sociological research during the fifties, too. It was in 1958 that A. H. Halsey with Jean Floud collected, commented and published the first ever bibliography in sociology of education (in Current Sociology – OVERHEAD: REF3). Education started to get this importance – we know – of a major agency of distribution and integration of the new generation within society.
–There is a strong theory behind this statement, of course. I have to mention – without going into the details of – the theoretical developments that came about (again in the same time) with the empirical testing of Talcott Parsons’ structuralist–functionalist theory predicting a turn towards achievement from ascription in modern society. A test of this point has been carried out later by Blau and Duncan [OVERHEAD: REF4] with rather positive result. So they had a huge impact on the development of the sociology of education by stressing the eminent role of education in modern social mobility.
And it was just one year later, in 1959, that Herbert H.[iram] Hyman has published the first monograph on political socialisation (Political Socialization. A Study in the Psychology of Political Behavior, The Free Press, New York, 1959. OVERHEAD: REF5). On the original question of stability and change in political behaviour he shed a new light with the perspective of socialisation. The basic questions studied were as follows:
a)Is political behaviour based on stable attitudes with minor changes only? or
b)Is it dominated by temporary effects of social, economic and political environment? (e.g. actual individual interests)
c)In general: if early socialisation has deep impact on one’s personality and carrier chances, how deep is its impact on political behaviour?
Hyman stresses the fruitfulness of psychology in studying political behaviour as a learned behaviour and makes reference to Almond’s 1956 article in the Journal of Politics (“Comparative Political Systems”) introducing the notion of “political culture”, a term which has connotations involving learning.
“The importance of such a formulation to understanding of political systems is self evident – humans must learn their political behavior early and well and persist in it. Otherwise there would be no regularity – perhaps even chaos.” (Hyman, 1959: 9-10. H’s italics) – OVERHEAD: CIT1
Hyman pointed out political participation (i.e. involvement) and political orientation as the fields on which he undertook an inventory of the psychology of politics while he was letting the inventory of “two other modes of psychological analysis”, namely that of cognitive and perceptual processes to others in the future.
It is characteristic that Hyman in political socialisation as well as A. H. Halsey in the sociology of education undertook an inventory of the existing studies of the field. Both of them found that systematic discussions hardly existed but an amazing extent of relevant literature could be inventoried.
(In brackets, I cannot resist to the temptation of drawing a parallel between those days and ours when we also attempt an inventory of social sciences at the moment of entering a new European era. Our motivation is different, however. Halsey’s and Hyman’s undertakings were aimed at giving form to an emerging new field of research, while our goal is organisational or social rather than academic in character. We are setting up an inventory of the actual activity of a particular group of researchers of existing and well defined disciplines – also limited to three disciplines and to the so-called accession countries – in order to fit it to the activity of a larger scientific community in the same field. No new research field is getting shape this time, the scientific community is reshaping itself, rather.)
Two years after the publication of Hyman’s book, in 1961, David Easton andRobert D. Hess presented a paper to the World Congress of the International Political Science Association in Paris (published in Volume VI, No 3, August 1962 in Midwest Journal of Political Science – OVERHEAD: REF6). They still saw very little research about political socialisation in the US and the available studies have “emerged largely out of an interest in matters posed by immediate practical considerations. How can we make better citizens out of those coming of age? How can we educate our children so that they will become better informed in politics and more highly motivated to take an interest in public affairs and to participate more actively? How can we secure them more tightly to a set of democratic beliefs?”
Easton and Hess urged instead “new patterns and strategies of basic research”, “an effort to illuminate and nurture theory”.
I am not going to follow the history of political socialisation in detail but point out this priority of practical considerations as leading to an inventory and a systematic basic research.
Hyman’s theoretical scheme proposes four main categories for the new field: participation, orientation, perception and cognition. Easton and Hess already re-interpret them into a more complex model. They keep the term orientation for the content of the behaviour and they distinguish three dimensions of this latter, transforming Hyman’s participation, perception and cognition into values, attitudes and knowledge. They also elaborate on the political side. Orientations in the three dimensions can concern three levels of the political system: community, regime and government. The proposed model was presented in the form of a 3x3 matrix [OVERHEAD: FIG 1].
Figure 1
Levels of the Political System / Basic Political OrientationsKnowledge / Values / Attitudes
Community
Regime
Government
Source: Easton & Hess, 1962: 234.
I wish to point out of it two developments for my perspective. First, this model is softer than Hyman’s approach in the sense that besides actions and knowledge, it is open to values and attitudes as well. Political participation does not even figure in it explicitly. This development will help studying early political socialisation, as we will see later. Secondly, it is more elaborate concerning the political system as major factor orienting individuals in the three dimensions. This development is not worthless, but it is more fruitful for psychological and sociological study of adults’ political behaviour than it is for studying early political socialisation.
However, if Easton and Hess merited to be mentioned in the perspective I choose, it is for the broader understanding of politics they propose to take in political socialisation. I quote their example:
“When the child first ask his parents a question typical in our society: “Daddy, who pays the policeman?” or “Why can’t you park your car there?” and when the father replies: “The city or major pays him,” or “It is against the law to park there,” the child has here received from a trusted source an early and important introduction to politics broadly conceived. […] Through indirect and casual ways like these, the child at a tender age begins to build up his conception of political life.” (Easton & Hess, 1962: 235 and 236) [OVERHEAD: CIT3]
Their “pre-test” (as they call it) led Easton & Hess to the suggestion that “by the time the child has completed elementary school, many basic political attitudes and values have become firmly established” and contrary to expectations of existing literature “by the time the child enters high school at the age of 14, his basic political orientations to regime and community have become quite firmly entrenched so that at least during the four years of high school little substantive change is visible.” (Easton & Hess, 1962: 236)
These early hypotheses have been largely verified by later studies in several countries. While the American researchers of political socialisation remained closer to the properly political field and many (if not most) of them turned to the study of political education, in French speaking countries early political socialisation became a major interest. Annick Percheron [OVERHEAD: REF7] exerted the largest influence in this field stressing that political values and attitudes of the child develop under the impact of not specifically political factors.
“If we wish to describe political socialisation, we can cut out three area of the social reality as a whole, which are linked to political socialisation by stronger or weaker ties: the zone of politics in proper sense, its immediate social and economic environment, and finally, a set of seemingly distant experiences some of which exert, however, a direct if not promptly impact on political socialisation (although together, they influence the phenomena of political learning very indirectly only).” (Percheron, 1974: 4) [OVERHEAD: CIT4]
Percheron considers socialization "political" when it explains the development of certain attitudes, the origin of certain behaviours, the tendency to play certain political roles. In this sense, political socialization is always integrated into the process of socialization as a whole. It would be more exact to say that political socialisation does not exist as such, it is an abstraction of a particular aspect of the process of socialisation only. It emerges very slowly from experiences of and reactions to everyday events of the child and tend to get existence of its own when the child begins to distinguish politics as a particular sphere of social life.
A follower of Percheron’s more psychological line, Anna Melich, in her study exploring “How to become a Swiss?” in political sense [OVERHEAD: REF8], approached, inter alia, the interrelation between development of the child’s personality and attitudes towards authority, autonomy, conflicts, control etc. through children’s everyday situations.
Besides describing major processes, twenty years from the end of the fifties to the beginning of the eighties have been enough to the researchers of political socialisation to explore the role played by different agencies of socialisation like the family, the peer groups, the school, the media, in this field. As the counterpart of in depth studies of fine psychological mechanisms of political socialisation, large surveys were carried out (primarily in the US) to validate hypotheses statistically. Niemi and Jennings analysed longitudinal data of parents and children and controlled the parents impact on their offspring’s political behaviour at two points in the lifetime of both generation. [OVERHEAD: REF9]
All these developments are vital not only for the small projects I directed, but for any further research on political socialisation.
However important Hyman’s, Easton and Hess’, Niemi and Jennings, Percheron’s and many others’ results are, unlike in physics or biochemistry they cannot be taken entirely granted in another country. But in countries like Hungary one could observe no similar developments. The very nature of the political regime excluded any possibility as well as any reason of systematic study on political socialisation. Still, like in many other field, Hungarian also were luckier than others “in the camp” in studying at least some aspects of political socialisation. These aspects concern primarily the attitudes toward the nation. As early as the seventies and later in the eighties, several studies have been carried out mainly by György Csepeli, László Kéri, Ildikó Szabó and others (e.g. Szabó and Csepeli: Politikai érzelmek iskolája [Educating political emotions] – OVERHEAD:REF10). Csepeli focused on topics related to national identity and maintained this interest through the nineties (1992), widening, however, the scope of his investigations beyond the Hungarian border to the whole Carpathian basin.
While carefully formulated articles on national feeling could be published under the Kádár-regime, and the first collection of studies in political socialisation came out in 1988 (see Hazai politikai szocializációs folyamatok [Processes of political socialisation in Hungary] – OVERHEAD: REF11), most result of these studies had to wait until the political turn in 1990. How could e.g. Ildikó Szabó earlier publish her founding that the communist regime, i.e. the world of "double speech", also was one of "double political socialization" where strong family impact counterbalanced the impact of political authorities. [OVERHEAD: REF12]
Political socialisation and political change
On the one hand, the political turn in 1989-1990 opened up new research fields and new freedom to carry out studies and publish results, but first of all, it opened up new ways of life for everyone.
In this perspective, the political turn put in the forefront the lifelong character of political socialisation and allowed Ildikó Szabó to forge the term political re-socialisation. [OVERHEAD: REF13]The new generation is growing up into a new world – “without any problem” I would say, in the sense that for them this is the only process of socialisation so it seems to be the normal way. It is not so for their parents and for the older age groups in general: they had already been socialised before the transition came, but the values they follow tend to fade, the attitudes and everyday routines they built up during their primary socialisation are now becoming inappropriate or even counterproductive. They have to reshape themselves and it is always a painful process. Hungarian entered the new era with the burden of a suddenly devaluated socialisation and with high and largely naive expectations.
Kyra Tomay (a student of mine who takes part in this research project) reflecting on re-socialisation came to the idea that in Central and Eastern Europe older generations can be even more influenced by youth’ values and attitudes than Mary Hepburn suggested in her contribution to the IPSA RCPSE conference in 1999, particularly because of this need of being re-socialised. [OVERHEAD:REF14] By Hepburn it is more probable today that young people can transmit their political interests and even cynicism to their parents and teachers than the inverted process that has always been considered normal.
Still, other factors can have a greater impact. Relying on several political sociological studies of the so-called transition period, particularly Péter Róbert’s [OVERHEAD: REF15], Tomay underlies the importance of the high and far too heated expectations of 1989-1992 and the following disillusion in the mid-nineties for the process of re-socialisation in Hungary. The Hungarian population did not play an active role in the changes, the changes – considered by most of them positive first – simply happened to them. That made disillusioning easier. It is still an important point to understand whether the buzzing years of the early nineties were exceptional or rather the time of disillusion. Judging on the live experience we tend to qualify disillusion exceptional, while compared to Western standards of political participation disillusioned Hungarian still do not leg behind too much. (May be it is another case of the half full/half empty glass.)