Organization of mass political attitudes in Hungary

Abstract

The paper analyses the organisation of mass political attitudes in Hungary. The analysis is based on a survey of a national sample of adult Hungarians (N =1002), conducted in the autumn of 2000. Political attitudes and values items, representing various ideological orientations, were reduced to a smaller number of latent ideological dimensions via factor analysis. The precise meaning of the dimensions is determined after the analysis of their relationships with authoritarianism, Social Dominance Orientation, outgroup-sympathy, prejudices, ideological self-identification, partypreference and socio-demographic variables. Hungarian mass attitudes vary along conventionalism, socialist conservatism, right wing conservatism and libertarianism. The latter three dimensions polarise politics into three oppositions: old versus new regime, religious-nationalist right versus secular liberal-left, and libertarian versus authoritarian.