The evolution of the ‘Carpathian Basin’ discourse in the Hungarian parliament (1998-2020)
We explore the use of the term “Carpathian Basin” in the Hungarian Parliament 1998-2020. The “Carpathian Basin” is a term of Hungarian geography, historically used to justify Hungary’s territorial claims during the interwar period. While it was absent from official discourse for decades, it...
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| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | deu |
| Published: |
Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, Belgrade
2025-01-01
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| Series: | Filozofija i Društvo |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://doiserbia.nb.rs/img/doi/0353-5738/2025/0353-57382502437K.pdf |
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| Summary: | We explore the use of the term “Carpathian Basin” in the Hungarian Parliament
1998-2020. The “Carpathian Basin” is a term of Hungarian geography,
historically used to justify Hungary’s territorial claims during the
interwar period. While it was absent from official discourse for decades, it
has recently gained traction among Hungary’s politicians. By processing 1525
speeches, we examine changes in the discourse of three major political blocs
(right-wing nationalist, liberal/left, and Fidesz) to capture the linguistic
representation of the dynamics of political polarization, and to identify
changes in politically driven identity patterns and framing differences.
Our paper has both methodological and substantive relevance. The
methodological novelty is that we apply methods that allow automated
processing of large text corpora without reading them, in a field where
previously mainly qualitative approaches were used. We show that it is
possible to detect changes in framing in an automated way without human
coding. From a substantive point of view, our study focuses on the
linguistic features of an important concept that differ from one political
ideology to another. We employ both supervised and unsupervised modeling
approaches. The supervised classification was used to examine changes in the
polarization of discourse, while the unsupervised tool (Structural Topic
Model) supported a more nuanced, qualitative interpretation of the results.
According to our results, the political ideology of the speakers of the
speeches can be predicted more effectively, i.e. a kind of
polarization-growth can be detected, while at the same time the deeper
analysis shows that parallels can be detected in the changing discourse of
different ideological sides. One such common feature is a more concentrated
focus on the Hungarian nation, as opposed to neighboring peoples and the
European Union. We also found discourse traits of both the left’s
rapprochement with the right (as an imprint of the left’s opening to
Hungarians beyond the borders after 2010) and the moderation of the far
right. |
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| ISSN: | 0353-5738 2334-8577 |