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This paper investigates the moderating role of public discourse in the effects of labeling asylum seekers on attitudes toward asylum policy. The study relies on a series of survey experiments conducted in Hungary in 2015 and 2016.
Originally, respondents were much more solidaristic toward “refugees” than “immigrants,” but the public discussion on asylum policy suppressed this wording effect—mainly by contaminating the concept of “refugee.”
A major lesson is that the power of words may be overestimated. Choice of words could have a significant effect on the audience when the stakes are low. However, when an issue is high on the agenda, wording alone cannot make up for the lack of deliberative analysis.

The regular report of the Chances for Children Association on child poverty Civil Report on Children’s Chances 2014-2017  starts with a chapter from TÁRKI researchers. When analysing the effects of the Great Recession on child poverty in Hungary, András Gábos and István György Tóth  found that the increase in child poverty in the first phase of the crisis (2007–10) was driven by labour market trends, while the (weakened, but still functioning) automatic stabilizers reduced the magnitude of these effects. By contrast, in the second phase (2010–13), labour market processes started to improve, though the shift towards a regressive social policy regime contributed to increased poverty rates via the reduced poverty reduction impacts of cash benefits.

TARKI’s senior researcher Peter Robert’s article explores cross-national variations in the impact of education on labour market outcomes using the risk of unemployment and occupational status as the key dependent variables. The study applies a comparative perspective on eight EU countries (three from CEE), representing different relationships between the education system and the labour market with various degrees of inequality, welfare provisions and labour market flexibility.  

What motivates people to behave morally; and how is this motivation connected to rational self-interest? The author starts from the beginning of the development of game theory and reviews the rational choice theories on the source of morality of the past 75 years to lay the ground for his own answers to those questions. He argues that motivation for moral action could not be separated from self-interest. Moral sense is simply the ability to understand cultural rules - formed and maintained in interactions of rational individuals - that set the conditions for enjoying the benefits of being an approved member of the society.

Click HERE to read more about the book (in Hungarian). 

An interview with Endre Sik was published in the CEASEVAL Spotlight series where he talks about what TARKI has been up to in the project in the past two years.

Click HERE to read it. 

Captivated by theory of the moral panic button by Endre Sik (TÁRKI), Sándor Kerekes summarizes how and why the practice of pushing the moral panic button evolved in Hungary in 2015. By adding a wider European social and political context, he also explains why this Hungarian political tool is unique in Europe.  

Click HERE to read the article on the Hungarian Spectrum.    
 

In recognition of their outstanding scientific work, the Presidium of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (HAS) awarded a restricted number of scientists with the Academic Award at the 191th Assembly of the HAS on Monday, 6 May 2019. István György Tóth, director of TÁRKI Social Research Institute and affiliated professor at Budapest Corvinus University was awarded the prize (alone in the field of social sciences) for recognizing his work on social structure, poverty and exclusion in Hungary and in international comparisons, on economics of the welfare state and for his research in the field of values and attitudes. The justification for the prize especially underlines his interdisciplinary work combining sociology, economics, statistics, demographics and value studies.

The aim of the authors was to describe the main characteristics of the relocation quota discourse in Hungary between 2015 and 2018. This topic was from the very beginning highly politicized all over the EU, and in several countries, was used as the core issue for debating a much wider array of topics, such as sovereignty, and “more or less Europe.” As far as politicization of the refugee crisis is concerned, Hungary is an extreme case where the issue of relocation quotas became the ultimate propaganda tool of a moral panic generating technique, an essential element of which is the moral panic button.

Click HERE to download the article.

After a brief and critical overview of the methodological basis of the research on the role of media in the politicization process of the migration crisis, the authors came to the conclusion that their knowledge is often based on analyses using rather unreliable methodology. As an illustration of a better solution, they created a large dataset from online articles published in Hungary between January 2015 and April 2018 and carried out an analysis of prevalence and some aspects of the content of the politicization process. 

Click HERE to download the paper. 

Click HERE to read more about the CEASEVAL project. 

The paper titled Changing Connotations and the Evolution of the Effect of Wording: Labeling Asylum Seekers in a Political Campaign investigates the moderating role of public discourse in the effects of labeling asylum seekers (as “immigrants” vs. “refugees”) on attitudes toward asylum policy. The study relies on a series of survey experiments conducted in Hungary, in a period when asylum policy suddenly became a highly salient issue there.

Click here to read the article.