The Evolution of the ‘Carpathian Basin’ Discourse in the Hungarian Parliament (1998–2020)

Abstract

We explore the use of the term “Carpathian Basin” in the Hungarian Parliament 1998-2020. The “Carpathian Basin” is a term of Hungarian geography, historically used to justify Hungary’s territorial claims during the interwar period. While it was absent from official discourse for decades, it has recently gained traction among Hungary’s politicians. By processing 1525 speeches, we examine changes in the discourse of three major political blocs (right-wing nationalist, liberal/left, and Fidesz) to capture the linguistic representation of the dynamics of political polarization, and to identify changes in politically driven identity patterns and framing differences.

Our paper has both methodological and substantive relevance. The methodological novelty is that we apply methods that allow automated processing of large text corpora without reading them, in a field where previously mainly qualitative approaches were used. We show that it is possible to detect changes in framing in an automated way without human coding. From a substantive point of view, our study focuses on the linguistic features of an important concept that differ from one political ideology to another.

We employ both supervised and unsupervised modeling approaches. The supervised classification was used to examine changes in the polarization of discourse, while the unsupervised tool (Structural Topic Model) supported a more nuanced, qualitative interpretation of the results. According to our results, the political ideology of the speakers of the speeches can be predicted more effectively, i.e. a kind of polarization-growth can be detected, while at the same time the deeper analysis shows that parallels can be detected in the changing discourse of different ideological sides. One such common feature is a more concentrated focus on the Hungarian nation, as opposed to neighboring peoples and the European Union. We also found discourse traits of both the left’s rapprochement with the right (as an imprint of the left’s opening to Hungarians beyond the borders after 2010) and the moderation of the far right.