Guidelines

This section provides an opportunity for researchers working on social and demographic change in Eastern Europe to share their ideas and disseminate their research results. Working papers can be brief reports about research in progress, empirical results and tentative conclusions as well as comprehensive studies.

The role of the working papers is to provide opportunities for the authors to test their results and conclusions before submitting the studies for publication. Thus, working papers are not peer-reviewed. We have certain guidelines for publication, but these are mostly addressing consistency, following the formatting guidelines of academic journals.

Working papers are published in pdf format. If necessary, we can produce pdfs from Word documents. Working papers also need to meet the following guidelines:

If you would like to publish a paper in this section, please contact Crisitina Bradatan.

Working papers
NOTE: Please contact the author(s) for permission to cite these papers. Thank You.

The European identity and citizenship of the university students in Gödöllő
Tibor Farkas and Dóra Kolta

The process of globalization already affects all the European countries. Its positive and negative consequences are challenging governments and peoples, too. One of the possible answer for the members of society is the strengthening their status as citizen. This paper will examine what are the differences in national identity, culture, attitudes among different countries in Europe and will analyze how it is possible to create the "public" in different countries. That is to develop civil initiatives and movements and to exert a great effort so that the citizens “opinion” has a real influence on the social life. There is an important role of the education, because its task is to raise a successful young generation which will gain good knowledge and its members will express themselves as morally matured citizens. That requires reaching a certain level of democracy which shows itself by respecting the rights of the minorities (ethnical, political and social), respecting the right to no deprivation of civil rights for freedom of meeting, association and expressing one's opinion by means of petition. Our examination is done upon four dimension of the citizenship (political/legal, social, cultural and economic) and there were interviewed students of economic faculties.
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Migration of Russian speakers from the Baltic countries to Ireland: role of ethnic politics and identity
Sofya Aptekar

In recent years, Ireland has attracted tens of thousands of migrants from Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, many of whom are members of large Russian-speaking minorities in the sending countries. This paper draws on interviews with Russian speakers who have migrated from the Baltic countries to Ireland in order to examine their contexts of exit, as well as some aspects of their adaptation to life in Ireland. For Russian-speaking migrants from Estonia, one of the primary motivations for emigrating is social stratification along ethnic lines and a sense of marginalization. Although Latvia’s language and citizenship policies are similarly restrictive, differences in the nature of ethnic relations and stratification help explain why migration to Ireland is motivated by economic factors more than alienation. Russian-speaking migrants from Lithuania, with its more generous minority policies and smaller minority population, also tend to cite higher wages and better employment opportunities in Ireland as their reason for migration. Nevertheless, minority status played a role in the migration of Russian speakers from all three Baltic countries. There is evidence that given ample experience as the ‘other’, these migrants may be especially adapted to lives as cultural and linguistic minorities and may be less likely to return.
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Abortion and the making of the socialist mother during Communist Romania
Lorena Anton

From 1966 to 1989, the Romanian Communist Party prohibited by law the right of pregnancy interruption, all in the name of the sanctity of the Romanian communist nation. In the public sphere, reproduction was fundamentally associated with „the nation” and its needs. Thus, every communist subject had to become an important part of Ceausescu's projects, and, most of all, every Romanian woman had to fulfill her role by becoming a prolific socialist mother. The main aim of this paper is to illustrate the ways by witch, with the help of the public discourse, a new identity had been constructed during the '60, and reinforced periodically until the fall of the Communist Regime, its center being dominated by the “socialist mother”. The communist discourse about “the heroine mother” (mama eroina) developed, in time, as the only accepted narration, all other identities or counter-narratives being automatically excluded. Starting from the articles within Scînteia, the Party's official journal, to films, radio shows or literature, the portrait of the socialist mother irrupted everywhere. Of course, the making of the socialist mother excluded even the idea of the existence of abortions executed any other ways than the ones permitted by the Communist state. Nevertheless, in spite of the Party's rules, and especially because along with abortion, Ceausescu prohibited also any existence of contraception on the Romanian territory, abortion had to developed itself as a common practice during those years. The individual memory of those times, recollected by the author during a three years research, in the form of oral-histories, constitutes, over the years, an alternative discourse, excluded during Communism, but possible after its fall as a form of counter-story at the public historical narration of the socialist mother. The second part of the paper will present an analysis of these individual narratives, excluded during Communism, but included now in the memory of this regime, in terms of recurrent topoi and their relation with the official communist discourse concerning abortion in Ceausescu's Romania.
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Does migration influence fertility? A case study.
Cristina Bradatan

It was argued that fertility and migration are not independent demographic phenomena (Singley and Landale, 1998). For the context of Eastern Europe, some authors considered that the measures of fertility are biased due to the shrinking populations through migration (Philipov, 2001). In this paper, using data from a community based survey on migration (2002) and various aggregated level statistics on fertility, I tried to see of there is any relationship between migration and fertility decline in Romania, an Eastern European country.
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Leaving for Good: The Impact of Development Differences on Migration
Tamás Domokos and László J. Kulcsár

This study examines the various indicators of life quality of 405 settlements in a dynamically developing region in Hungary. We explore the correlation and interdependence of different life quality components with regards to migration statistics in the region. Following a macro-level approach, we use aggregated statistics to build a regression model explaining the impact of various indicators on migration rates as our dependent variable. We also will differentiate various clusters of settlements in the region by their common dimensions of life quality and migration, and examine how these clusters created by the regression model will fit into traditional territorial categories of sociology (rural-urban dimension, statistical micro-regions, town and agglomeration).
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One Generation but Two Places: Tolerance and Nationalist Attitudes among Ethnic Hungarian Students in Hungary and Slovakia
Tamás Domokos and László J. Kulcsár

This paper examines the level of interethnic tolerance and nationalist attitudes among ethnic Hungarian 8th and 11th grade students in Hungary and in Slovakia. We use a survey conducted in 2001 among elementary and high school students in two large cities (Miskolc, Hungary and Kosice, Slovakia) and a number of small towns around them. The two cities are only about 60 miles from each other, but the state border in between has really made a difference in the socioeconomic development of the two places. Both are heavy industrial centers, a preferred place of development during socialism, but much less successful after 1990. Kosice, however, was performing more regional and cultural center roles with rich civic traditions in the past. We also investigate the differences in opinions between 8th and 11th grade students in both places. One interesting analysis is the comparison of opinion differences in Hungary and Slovakia respectively. This can tell us many things about the socialization process in both countries, with regards to the role of public education, the perception of majority and minority situation and the changes in the perception of being Hungarian in the two places.
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Post-adolescent adulthood? Changes in Family Formation and Adult Demographic Behavior in Post-Socialist Hungary
Tamás Domokos and László J. Kulcsár

According to Keniston’s concept of post-adolescence, during the transition to adulthood various traditional steps (finishing studies, entering the labor force, separating from the parental household, marriage, childbearing) are realized to become an adult member in the society. However, in post-socialist societies this traditional pattern has been changing rapidly. Three major schools can be distinguished with regards to the explanation of the radical transformation in family formation. The first explains it with the transformation culture, social norms and values, the strengthening of individualization and the change of values affecting gender roles. The second focuses on household economics and the deterioration of material conditions. The third approach emphasizes the social disintegration, widespread anomie and the difficulty of planning of the individual life course. Using data from the Hungarian Social and Demographic Panel Survey from 2001 and 2004, we examine who could reach the adult status, forming a family in 2004 from those young people who were considered post-adolescent in 2001. We identify the policy implications of these changes interacting with family formation, fertility behavior, labor mobility and various other social services.
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