Authors

Ángel Torres-Adán¹;  ¹ Institute for Sociology-Slovak Academy of Sciences, Slovakia

Discussion

The existence of ethnic gaps in political attitudes between Hungarians and Slovaks in Slovakia is often assumed, but the empirical evidence for their existence is limited. Since ethnic Hungarians number about 400,000 and represent about 8% of the population of the Slovak Republic, I argue that understanding how ethnic Hungarians and ethnic Slovaks differ politically is key to a better understanding of the Slovak political system and the country's society as a whole. Therefore, the main goal of this paper is to conduct a systematic empirical analysis of potential ethnic gaps, their size and possible causes (linguistic, socio-demographic, ideological, historical, etc.).  Do Hungarians and Slovaks have different political and geopolitical attitudes? If so, which attitudes? And what factors contribute to these differences? I plan to answer these three research questions by building on the literature studying ethnic gaps in political attitudes and their sources, and by using survey data overrepresenting ethnic Hungarians collected in Slovakia in the spring of 2024. Specifically, this paper aims to identify, measure, and attempt to identify a set of potential within-group and between group differences causing ethnic gaps in several political (e.g. voter turnout, interest in Slovak politics, etc.), historical, (dissolution of Czechoslovakia, attitudes towards Trianon, etc.) and geopolitical variables (e.g. support for Russia or the West, attitudes towards the V4 group, etc.).