The impact of narratives on policy-making at the national level. The case of Hungary
BRIDGES Working paper 22 (November 2023)
In order to indentify the main narratives of migration and describing the structure into which the processes of producing and circulating them characterizes the contemporary Hungarian communicative and political segments, first we defined the type of political system of Hungary. The next step was demonstrating the production and circulation of migration related narratives since 2015 to prove that there is a rather sophisticated propaganda organization and technology (the moral panic button, MPB) which makes sure that these processes serve the operation of the political system. Our analysis demonstrated that MPB used the production and circulation of migration narratives both in 2015 and in 2022 as a crucial aspect of building the Hungarian version of an authoritarian regime (the so called informational autocracy). We stressed that the capture of entire communication field was an inherent element of this de-democratization process, and that while several techniques of MPB exist in other countries as well, the unique mix of them and their high-inertia existence makes Hungary an outlier in the comparative analysis.