Regional Elections in Hungary: Second-Order Elections or Not?

Hungary was among the first in the Central-Eastern European countries to introduce regional-level elections in 1990 at the first reform of the local government system. Despite its early appearance middle-tier politics had always played a questionable role in the hierarchy of local governments where the basic element is the municipality instead of the middle-level county. Municipalities are in the centre of the system and bear most of the political, financial and social responsibility while county governments play a complementary role and their resources had been further trimmed since 1990.

As a result regional elections are regarded as second-order elections in Hungary, which taking place approximately six months after the national elections every four years, whereby voters reflect on the evaluation of the government’s first few months in office. While parties in parliament certainly enjoy an advantage a surprising number of local actors appear in regional elections which suggest a certain autonomy of regional level politics. Along with new actors appearing we can also witness that certain type of parliamentary parties like smaller green and/or liberal parties running unsuccessfully at the regional level. These deviances suggest that while regional level politics are dominated by national politics they follow a slightly different logic that could reflect the territoriality of regional votes.

The aim of our paper is to give an insight into the dynamics of local politics in Hungary through the analysis of regional elections results, to discover the similarities and differences between regional, local and national elections and to offer possible explanations. The fact that regional elections are organised in a proportional system with regional party lists offers the possibility to compare these results with the proportional tier of the national elections which also organised along party lists.