FactGrid:Network of the political and administrative elite of Hungary's communist era

According to the positional elite concept, the range of elite positions is determined by top-level decision-making competence, and the elite group consists of the person occupying the elite position. To understand the selection of elites in socialist systems, it is necessary to examine the political, economic, cultural fields, above all the levels of the management hierarchy and the relationships between the individual levels. The administrative structure of the era was characterized by the parallel operation of the governing bodies of the party and the state, and the duplication of individual management levels. At the level of formal hierarchies, we can see two independent systems, the party and the state administration, which were connected to each other on several threads. Moreover, the image of the communist political system cannot be complete without the hierarchy of mass organizations which in practice operated under the subordination of the party and the state. The leaders of the mass organizations were included in the dual hierarchy of the party-state through their other management functions or personal characteristics. Through the interconnected hierarchies, a more or less unified cadre elite was formed.

To build the archontological database, we first defined the range of relevant positions. In addition to party, state and mass organization leaders, we also included other positions in the investigation. The database includes positions at the top of the cultural and scientific sector: membership of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, university rectors and management positions of the most important public cultural bodies; church leadership positions, the diplomatic elite, as well as CEOs of large state-owned companies.

The database also contains the most important state awards and their recipients - our goal is to start creating an elite sample of reputation that differs from the positional approach.

FactGrid Research: A database of the political and administrative elite of Hungary's "post-war" and communist era

Contact: László Kiss

research fellow

HUN-REN Centre for Social Sciences, Budapest

kiss.laszlo@tk.hu

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