Closing the Expectation Gap? Crisis of Hungarian Parliamentarism in the Inter-War Period

Abstract

In the mid-1920s, the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) recognized the widespread discontent of the electorate with the parliamentary system of government in general and, more specifically, with the institution of parliaments in many European countries. The IPU asked some internationally renowned experts to share their views on the causes and consequences of this crisis and formulated at the same time a resolution that included some proposals about how the crisis could be overcome. The Hungarian National Group of the IPU forwarded the proposals to politicians and scholars and published an edited volume with reactions from the Hungarian respondents in 1929. This chapter will present an overview of these reactions, but first a narrative framework that might be applied to the Hungarian reactions to the IPU proposals will be presented (section ‘Narrative Framework: The Crisis of Parliamentarism and the Expectation Gap’). Secondly, this chapter delineates the general political context in Hungary with special reference to the development of Hungarian parliamentarism in the inter-war period (section ‘Developments of Parliamentarism in Hungary in the Inter-War Period’). Thirdly, some insights into the public discourse on the crisis of parliamentarism will be given (section ‘Developments of the Political Discourse on Parliamentarism’), and fourthly the Hungarian reactions to the IPU proposals will be analysed (section ‘Hungarian Reactions to the IPU Draft Resolution from 1928’).