Summarium
Summary

Summary/Abstract: Political socialization has been living its revival since the end of the eighties all over the world. Besides the conservative turn of Western democracies and the crisis of welfare states, the collapse of communist regimes is one of those major political changes that accounts for a reexamination of the area. Not only have the political regimes changed, but also the closest surroundings of the youth, the family, school and neighborhood as well. Although all these would give a ground for designing a wide panorama about the present-day roles of the main socializing agents in the process of political socialization, however, this would be too ambitious for a single thematic issue. Instead, we have chosen only a few topics that got new emphasis with the present-day wave of political socialization, or it received a fresh light. They also include an examination of specific socializing factors. The research of political socialization in Hungary has always been related to the question of national identity. It is well-known from international literature, that national symbols are the first elements in the socialization process. The issue is more than that in our country: while socialization by the state and by the family was contradictory, national identity became a current stake. The conditions of this process ceased to exist after the change of regime, it is time therefore to begin analyzing the relationships. Ildiko Szabo examines the question of national identity placing it in a larger theoretical framework of the formation of collective identities. She has shown that this issue is not independent from the extreme right phenomena, from the counter effects of integrative processes and the newly formulated interethnic and cultural relationships. Among the problematic areas sensed by her, we will stress the importance of interethnic relations, which has been the topic of several researches in the nineties. Zsolt Enyedi and Bojan Todosijević, by comparing two towns (Salgotarjan and Sopron) with good inspiration, they test whether the authoritarian personality or the cultural expectations of the environment explains prejudices better. According to their results the two theories are indeed reconcilable, and the main differences between them lie in the difference of emphasis given for various aspects of prejudices. The theory of authoritarian personality is about individual accepting of prejudiced attitudes, while the hypothesis of normative expectations explains it with those wider sodo-cultural conditions that are placed as a medium between the individual character and prejudices. Their analysis reveals that the prejudiced culture gives birth to prejudiced individuals, however, individuals are not passive subjects of culture. Authoritarian personalities tend to hate the groups which “we all hate”, they prove to be passionate followers, but it is probable that they also find private targets for themselves. The complexity and sometimes confusing connections between prejudices at children and their parents is a sign of the necessity to continue the research on this.

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