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This essay offers a socio-historical analysis of the urban elite of the city of Sopron in Western Hungary as a paradigmatic example of the changes that were implemented in municipal administration at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries to meet the demands of the centralized state. It examines the process whereby the centralized state began to assert its influence in municipal affairs in the interests of reestablishing and strengthening the cities as sources of tax revenue and furthering the reinstatement of Catholicism. Alongside the confessional shifts that took place, the distinctive social characteristics of the leading urban elite also changed: because of the small number of educated Catholics among the burgesses, an increasing number of state officials and educated servants who earlier had been in the service of owners of large estates rose to prominent positions in municipal administration. Because of the expectations of the state regarding professional qualifications and the dependence on the central offices, the roles of the municipal officials were increasingly intertwined with the affairs of public administration. They came to be the precursors to the so-called “honorácior” stratum, a social class of intellectuals and civil servants who played a prominent role in the growth of a new bureaucracy in the nineteenth century.
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This essay examines the changes that took place in the functions of sacred spaces towards the end of the seventeenth century, at the time of the upheavals of the Counter-Reformation in Upper Hungary. After having come under the control of the Catholic Church, the Protestant churches underwent a symbolic transformation characteristic of Catholic practice and belief. This transformation included changes to the furnishings and the inner spaces of the churches. At the time of the uprising led by Imre Thököly and Protestant refugees, along with the Catholic vicarage, these buildings, which were expressions of confessional belonging, became the primary targets of ritual violence. Through similar transformations and renovations, churches which since the Reformation had performed secular functions regained their status as religious buildings. In both cases, the participation of the community in Catholic rituals, such as re-consecration, mass, and procession, played a decisive role, since these rituals strengthened and helped to institutionalize (from the perspective of Catholic rites) the sacral function of the building.
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This essay is intended to further an understanding of the early stage in the rise of the bourgeoisie in Hungary through a thorough examination of the Pressburg (in Hungarian Pozsony and today Bratislava) Lutheran parish, which was arguably one of the most urbanized and broad-minded communities in terms of social ambitions of the period. After an overview of the historiography of the burghers in the late phase of estate societies, the author describes the demographical and social settings in which the burghers were both able and compelled to make decisions concerning the futures of their children. In the second part the essay analyzes three families that proved especially talented in their endeavor to adapt to the changing circumstances with a diverse family strategy that included the attainment of the status of nobility, family links to the estate elite, academic schooling, emigration to more promising cities, and the creation of super-urban family networks.
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A town hall, the most important public asset of the urban community, was at the same time the house of the community, the site of gatherings, and the symbol of town autonomy and privileges in the early modern period. As part of the humanist rediscovery of the antique tradition, a new wave of town hall constructions and renovations began in the second half of the sixteenth century in Transylvania. This essay seeks to determine how the new morality accompanying the Reformation influenced municipal leadership, and how the municipal elite projected its own image in the exterior and interior spaces of the town hall. This kind of civic ostentation, or, as the Protestant preacher Gáspár Heltai put it, “exhibitionism,” may also be ascribed to the emergence and development of early modern civic awareness.
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This essay examines the processes by which police oversight came to emerge in Budapest at the turn of the century and expanded to cover ever larger sections of the city. It also considers aspects of public safety from the perspective of the relationship between the capital and the urban communities on its periphery. The patterns of the expansion of police authorities in the urban space suggest that, rather than exercise control over social groups (workers, the poor) perceived as potentially dangerous by representatives of power, the police were called upon to protect private property, and in particular to exercise authority in parts of the city in which members of the elite and middle class lived. In contrast, in the outlying parts of the city one has the impression at first glance that the police increased its presence first and foremost in areas in which members of the working class lived. Closer scrutiny, however, reveals that the expansion of the authority of the municipal police to the outlying parts of the city served not to further the “compelled acculturation” of workers, but rather as a means of removing “undesirable” elements (criminals, vagrants, and beggars who traveled between the inner districts and the outskirts) from the capital.
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This essay examines a conflict that arose between “Christian” and “Jewish” inhabitants of a tenement near the large ring street (Nagykörút, Grand Boulevard) in Budapest during the Second World War and in its immediate aftermath, when a new political system was beginning to take form. The analysis is based on documents related to a case involving housing matters and a case that came before one of the People’s Courts. I consider the cultural context in which a middle class “Christian gentleman’s” family that was suffering impoverishment and a decline in social mobility interpreted the “Jewish” milieu in which it found itself, a milieu that presented continuous affronts to its norms but from which it was unable to extricate itself because of the housing system, which was under close scrutiny given the circumstances of the war. How did the Jewish inhabitants of the tenement, most of whom had suffered persecution, respond to this family in the wake of the political changes of 1945? My intention is to shed light on the long term social process by which the official and hierarchical social image of the Horthy system and the concomitant system of norms began to lose their substance and relevance in the first half of the 1940s as a consequence of the impoverishment of the middle class and increasingly limited housing mobility. This took place before this system began, in 1945, to be exposed to radical attacks cloaked in the garb of political legitimacy.
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The two most important changes in the urban spaces of the walled cities of Hungary in the period between the end of the eighteenth century and the middle of the nineteenth were the growth of the outer cities and the demolition of the city walls. This essay examines the consequences of these changes from the perspective of the social and political consequences of the shifts that took place in the concept of the city and the borders of the urban space, considering a specific case on the one hand, the city of Kassa (or Košice), and national tendencies on the other. The physical growth of the city and the gradual urbanization of the outer cities not only led to changes in the prevailing understanding of the “city” (which earlier had been identified as the area within the city walls), but made increasingly inevitable the creation, in a space that had been fragmented by the various privileges enjoyed by some of its inhabitants, of a legally unified city, as well as the incorporation of the outer cities, which had varying statuses, into the jurisdiction of the municipality. This, however, conflicted with the prevailing system of noble privileges, and the situation went unresolved until 1848, when the revolution made possible the transformation of the political structure of the entire country.
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In the paper is done a comparatively analysis of the Bulgarian economy with Central and East European countries, members of European Union, which are quite close to the Bulgarian economy. It is found a serious retardation of the energy efficiency dynamics in Bulgaria. That is why, there are given many recommendations to improve the energy consumption, energy and carbon intensity and energy structure of the Bulgarian economy. As well, it is presented forecast data about Bulgaria up to 2030 in the context of the effective energy consumption of economy and respective comparative analysis with the Central and East European countries. In conclusion are suggested a lot of measures for improving the production, energy, ecological and investment policy of the country aimed to increase the Bulgarian energy safety, energy efficiency, sustainable development and competitivity of the economy.
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The paper discusses the change of the influence of certain branches and branch changes on the economic growth, particularly the labor productivity observed in the last few decades. As a result the processing industry is replaced by the service sector, which gradually becomes dominating since 1970s. For this purpose it is proved with the results of a long-lasting work of the Groningen Growth and Development Centre (The Netherlands) concerning countries from European Union and USA in the second half of 20th century – mainly in 1980s and 1990s and until the middle of the first decade of 21st century. The achieved results give reasons for a change of the existing stylized facts formulated by N. Kaldor (1967), S. Kuznets (1971) and A. Maddison (1980).
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The paper presents the views of Buchanan on making collective fiscal decisions in conditions of simple majority, of the usefulness function of the politicians, bureaucrats and lobbies and the myopia in the behavior of the electors. He draws the conclusion that the fiscal decisions are ineffective, because they do not take into consideration the preferences of the electors. For overcoming this effect (defined by Arrow as theorem of impossibility of the society to reach effective collective decisions), Buchanan suggests introducing constitutional rights, which would make the public choice more effective. According to him, there are three different possible constitutions (on taxing, fiscal redistribution and money supply), or one Constitution, which includes tax, fiscal and monetary rules. To some or other degree, many countries have adopted fiscal and monetary rules in their Constitutions. After the crisis in 2008-2011, adopting fiscal rules is already considered an inevitable decision for achieving fiscal discipline and stability in the development of the different European countries and the Eurozone.
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The paper presents the results of a systematic analysis of four targeted social assistance programs, carried out for the first time in a Bulgarian scientific research. The analysis covers the key characteristics of the programs – objectives, target groups, guaranteed rights, approach to the way of setting benefit amount, access criteria to targeted benefits, financing methods, major results achieved in the different economic development periods after the changes of 1990. The author has synthesized scientific and applied research findings and evaluations of development and implementation of policies on targeted social assistance in different macroeconomic environment as part of the modernization of social assistance during the period 1990-2010.
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The paper analyzes the structural sources and characteristics of the inflation process in Bulgaria in different sections of the economy and of the consumer price index (CPI). It studies the behavior of the wage, the average labour productivity, as well as the existing between them dependencies by economic sectors, economic activities and some of their groups. It interprets the dynamics of these indicators in the sectors of tradable and non-tradable goods, and traces the changes in the relative prices of the non-tradable goods. It comments the changes in the relative prices of the goods with competitive and administrated prices, and of aggregated groups of goods and services in the CPI structure. The paper draws the connection of the analyzed indicators and the correspondences with the dynamics of the general price level. It evaluates the empirical validity in the Bulgarian conditions of base assumptions and conclusions of some of the fundamental structural inflation models.
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Peter Gajdoš: Človek, spoločnosť, prostredie. Priestorová sociológia – Man, Society, Environment. Spatial Sociology . Institute for Sociology at the Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava 2002, 374 pages
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The precautionary principle convey one nine psychology which is to integrate prevention policy within the parameters of action or decision in case of unknown risk or can’t be achieved in a never or only very distant future. Law does not recognize the significance of the precautionary principle unanimously. In fact, there is a difference between international and European courts, France respectively. Currently it is illustrated in several fields privileges: health protection and food safety, GMOs, mobile telephony, the use of substances and risk products.
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