The main question of this paper is what factors influence willingness to participate in a smartphone-application-based data collection where participants both fill out a questionnaire and let the app collect data on their smartphone usage. Passive digital data collection is becoming more common, but it is still a new form of data collection. Due to the novelty factor, it is important to investigate how willingness to participate in such studies is influenced by both socio-economic variables and smartphone usage behaviour. We estimate multilevel models based on a survey experiment with vignettes for different characteristics of data collection (e.g., different incentives, duration of the study). Our results show that of the socio-demographic variables, age has the largest influence, with younger age groups having a higher willingness to participate than older ones. Smartphone use also has an impact on participation. Advanced users are more likely to participate, while users who only use the basic functions of their device are less likely to participate than those who use it mainly for social media. Finally, the explorative analysis with interaction terms between levels has shown that the circumstances of data collection matter differently for different social groups. These findings provide important clues on how to fine-tune circumstances to improve participation rates in this novel passive digital data collection.

Az ország politikusai meghatározó módon formálják a közvéleményt, Magyarországon az utóbbi években erre kiváló példa a migráció témája és annak keretezése. Kutatásunk Orbán Viktor 2010. május és 2020. december között elmondott – online elérhető – beszédeit elemezi, a migráció témájára fókuszálva, ezzel is hozzájárulva a beszédek társadalmi szempontból releváns üzeneteinek megértéséhez és a migráció tárgyalásmódjának feltárásához. Elemzésünk a természetesnyelv-feldolgozás és szöveganalitika alapvető leíró eszközeit használva ad számot a beszédek migráció szempontjából releváns aspektusairól. Munkánkban kitérünk a bevándorlás kérdésének társadalmi kontextusára, az ahhoz kapcsolódó politikai kommunikáció korábbi elemzéseire, illetve az elméleti keretek alapján kvantitatív szöveganalitikai elemzést is végzünk. Tanulmányunkban rámutatunk a migráció szempontjából kiemelt jelentőségű szavak relatív gyakoriságának változására és ennek időbeli dinamikájára is, továbbá összehasonlítjuk azok előfordulását a Magyarországon és külföldön elhangzott beszédekben. A kutatáshoz meghatározott kulcsszavak közé tartozik a „menekült”, a „bevándorló”, a „migráns”, illetve a „migráció” és a „bevándorlás”. Elemzésünk eredményei alapján például beazonosítható, hogy mely ponton változik meg Orbán Viktor politikai kommunikációja; mikortól kerül háttérbe a „menekült” és „bevándorló” szavak használata, és válik dominánssá a „migráns” kifejezés a beszédekben. Reflektálunk a korábbi kutatási eredményekre is, hiszen a munkánk során találtak szépen illeszkednek azokhoz.

Social and linguistic differences encoded in various textual content available on the internet represent certain features of modern societies. For any scientific research which is interested in social differences mediated by language, the advent of large language models (LLMs) has brought new opportunities. LLMs could be used to extract information about different groups of society and utilized as data providers by acting as virtual respondents generating answers as such. Using LLMs (GPT-variants, Llama2, and Mixtral), we generated virtual answers for politics and democracy related attitude questions of the European Social Survey (10th wave) and statistically compared the results of the simulated responses to the real ones. We explored different prompting techniques and the effect of different types and richness of contextual information provided to the models. Our results suggest that the tested LLMs generate highly realistic answers and are good at invoking the needed patterns from limited contextual information given to them if a couple of relevant examples are provided, but struggle in a zero-shot setting. A critical methodological analysis is inevitable when considering the potential use of data generated by LLMs for scientific research, the exploration of known biases and reflection on social reality not represented on the internet are essential.

This paper studies the views of Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán on religion and Christianity, using both quantitative and qualitative methods. The analysis is based on Viktor Orbán’s speeches in Băile Tușnad, at Bálványos Free Summer University and Student Camp (commonly known as Tusványos), which are suitable to sensitively trace the evolution of his thinking from 1990 to 2022. The analysis shows how the concept of Christianity has changed in meaning in the speeches, how it has been linked to political issues, and in what ways Orbán’s thinking has been similar to and different from political Christianity and religious Christianity. Orbán’s concept of Christianity can be understood within the theoretical framework of populism developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe: in the discursive struggle for political hegemony, there is a continuous construction of ‘the people’, of society, in which ‘empty markers’ play a key role. Orbán’s concept of Christianity can thus be adequately interpreted in terms of the discourse of the permanent creation of the ‘nation’. The political emphasis on Christianity is related to the wounded collective identity of Hungarian society. The paper argues that because of the collective woundedness, society requires an overarching narrative symbolizing unity, of which Christianity is a key concept.

This study investigates the prevalent use of fear as a political tool by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Through critical discourse analysis and automated text analytics, we analyze the State of the Nation addresses from 2010 to 2022, identifying recurring enemy images such as ‘Brussels’, ‘migrants’, ‘George Soros’, ‘Ferenc Gyurcsány’ and ‘opposition.’ National Consultations are also examined to understand fear-inducing strategies. Our findings reveal a consistent pattern of fearmongering, with enemy images aligning with key events and political contexts. By employing both qualitative and quantitative methods, this research deepens our understanding of fear’s role in shaping public perceptions and political dynamics. It sheds light on the strategic use of fear in Hungarian politics and its impact on democratic processes. Furthermore, the study highlights the implications for the construction of illiberal systems in Central and Eastern Europe. The analysis of Orbán’s discourse provides valuable insights into the manipulation of public sentiment and the consolidation of power through fear tactics. This study contributes to the broader discourse on the intersections of fear and politics, providing insight into fearmongering through official speeches.

A key tenet from research on geographical concepts is that these are never neutral but filled with different ideas and agendas. The ‘Carpathian Basin’ is one of the most significant concepts in Hungarian geographical thought, but its recently reemerging use in political discourse has not yet been studied through quantitative text analysis. In this paper, we describe how a structural topic model was used to analyze the 1,525 speeches containing the term delivered in the Hungarian Parliament between 1998 and 2020. Our results indicate a renaissance in the use of the term, both in terms of its more frequent use and its discursive meaning as a sign of a turn in national policy. At the same time, ‘Carpathian Basin’ discourse serves as a symbolic battleground for different political ideologies to indicate both neutral geographical references and nationalist sentiments. Left-liberals tend to use it politically neutrally, referring to an ethno-culturally heterogeneous area, and using a less personal voice, referring to institutions and interests. In contrast, right-wing narratives often demarcate the Carpathian Basin as a single geographical entity. Some of these speeches exhibit virtual nationalism, while others subtly question territorial legitimacy. The latter MPs speak in terms of representing their own community, referring to values, emotions, and culture, offering a collective identity to which people attach values and emotions.