Papers by László Petrovszki
Incumbent politicians are politicians, who gained an office through elections and are currently h... more Incumbent politicians are politicians, who gained an office through elections and are currently holding the said office. According to the theory of incumbency advantage, these politicians enjoy a favourable position during their next election. A large spectrum of political science literature is dealing with this phenomenon since decades, especially in the United States of America. The goal of my study is the unveil the possible ways to analyze Hungarian elections on different levels (European, legislative and local). First of all, I explain the main conceptual background and basic methods of incumbency analysis, such as sophomore surge and retirement slump. Following this in the next part, I summarize important international literature, which helps to provide examples for possible and useful viewpoints of incumbency analysis. The main sources are from the United States, but incumbency study is also spreading around the globe recently. The Hungarian sources are scarce, but they offer...
Media in History: An Introduction to the Meanings and Transformations of Communication over Time ... more Media in History: An Introduction to the Meanings and Transformations of Communication over Time by Jukka Kortti is not just another attempt to be a 'history of media' volume. The author takes a fresh approach and places media into the perspective of human history, instead of vice versa. The prime goal of this method is to provide a counter argument to the 'revolution talk' concerning contemporary media studies. There is an argument that it is a necessity to understand the changes happening nowadays in the fields of media, such as the internet and social media, and in order to do that we should examine their evolution. This perspective may enable us to realize that although the antecedents of the phenomena were claimed to be innovative and novel, they have all existed earlier in the history of mankind. Jukka Kortti is Adjunct Professor at the University of Helsinki and Aalto University, so an educative spirit is noticeable through the whole text. As mentioned in the Acknowledgments part of the book, the original Finnish version was inspired by the author's own course in media history. The book could be an excellent source for students of various social science fields to understand the basics of media history. Nonetheless, it has more than enough content for seasoned scholars of communication studies, political scientists, historians and researchers of other segments of social sciences. It is also refreshing in regard to its scope. It not only focuses on the USA and western Europe, but also brings examples from other parts of Europe, mainly from Finland. The book besides the Acknowledgments, Introduction and Conclusion is divided into two main parts with each part being segmented into nine chapters, which are divided further into brief subchapters. At the end of some chapters, there are questions and thoughts for further discussions. The first part of four chapters is titled The Development of Media and provides a chronological historical background for the understanding of the importance of media in history. The first chapter begins with the invention of the alphabet 5000 years ago. The book guides us through the early transformation of oral communication into textual. The author underlines that large-scale written culture could only develop after Gutenberg invented the printing press in the fifteenth
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Papers by László Petrovszki