Party Manifestos in a New Democracy

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to explore the content of party manifestos in Hungary, a new democracy. Aft er describing the party system, it surveys the manifestos of all parliamentary parties between the first free electi on in 1990 and the latest one in 2010 (except for the election in 1998). The adoption, length and layout of manifestos are examined with the aim of fi nding temporal and structural patterns. The last section focuses on the pledges made by the major parties (government parties+ the largest oppositi on party) in 2002, and formulate several hypotheses about the potenti al explanati ons for the variance in the number and informativeness of manifesto pledges