Staats- und Sozialwissenschaften

From the outset, science and technology studies (STS) has been very good at detecting and discussing the politics of seemingly neutral and functional devices in the societal fabric (associated with laboratories, hospitals, factories, museums, and innovation centres) by examining the work that goes into their construction and operation. Interestingly, however, it has paid rather little attention to devices within politics, that is, artefacts that constitute the infrastructure of democracy and governing itself. These devices, on the one hand, include parliaments, parties, electoral systems, courts, and regulatory agencies, all of which are expected to function as core components of a ‘political system’, performing a political community and its collective decisions. On the other hand, they include policy instruments, modes of governance, and regulatory mechanisms, that are often treated as calculable generators of specified social outcomes, ready for use anywhere, at any time. Drawing on the STS literature on the politics of socio-technical devices in general, and our empirical research on the Hungarian Parliament and emissions trading and citizen juries as policy instruments in particular, in this introductory paper we will outline two interrelated ways of studying politics as various sets of material practices. By doing so, our aim is to generate productive discussions amongst the participants of the ‘Political Devices’ open panel about what count as political devices, how they relate to each other, and how their study may contribute to the re-politicisation of politics in an era when governing seems to be an increasingly technical problem.

What does it mean to do politics? And how are numbers involved? In this paper I address these questions by telling three interrelated stories about the ways in which democratic politics is expressed in and through numbers, and discussing what those numbers in turn tell us about political participation in a democracy.

All three stories come from my recently completed PhD thesis, which is a material-semiotic analysis of the Parliament in Hungary – a country where democracy is said to have begun after the fall of communism in 1989. Indeed, my first story leads straight back to the first democratic election in 1990, in which the Alliance of Free Democrats (AFD) – a liberal party that is often portrayed as the movement that initiated the regime change in Hungary – came second behind the conservatives, gaining 24.09% of the seats in the new National Assembly. Four years later, with 17.62% of the seats, the liberals retained their second position, despite the fact that by then the conservatives lost most of their support, and decided to form a coalition government with the Hungarian Socialist Party (HSP), which received more than half of the votes in the second democratic election. Whether it was the difficult economic situation of post-communist Hungary or the political scandals of the first liberal-socialist coalition that then led to the dramatic loss of popularity of the AFD is difficult to tell. What is certain is that in the third democratic election the liberal party barely crossed the 5% threshold required to make it into the parliament, and so it became one of the smallest parties in the National Assembly. After 1998, the liberals could not break out of the small party status: both in 2002 and in 2006 they received only 5.18% of the mandates. This allowed them to form another governing coalition with the socialists, but also made them look like the little brother of the HSP with no will of its own.

Just how frustrating this little brother position must have been for the liberals becomes clear in my second story, which is about the AFD’s attempt to liberalise the Hungarian healthcare system. Healthcare was regarded as one of the symbolic issues of the second liberal-socialist coalition, and so from the beginning of the 2006-2010 term the conservatives did whatever they could to undermine all healthcare-related initiatives. In the end of 2007, when the government’s new healthcare bill was passed by the National Assembly, the opposition called for a referendum, arguing that it was the people’s right to decide whether they wanted to pay daily hospital fees and consultation fees, or preferred the healthcare system to remain publicly funded. The outcome of the referendum, which took place on the 9th March 2008, was devastating for the government: 84.08% of the people voted against the daily hospital fees and 82.22% against the consultation fees. As a result, the socialist Prime Minister announced the withdrawal of the new healthcare law, and – adding insult to injury – on the 31st March 2008 unilaterally sacked the liberal Minister of Health, blaming entirely her and her party for the failed reform.

As if the result of the referendum and the sacking of their key minister were not enough trouble for the liberals, in the end of March 2008 a large commercial opinion poll company published a report, according to which the popularity of the AFD among Hungarian voters was not higher than 1% – the worst result since the regime change in 1990. My third story is about this report, and the liberal politicians’ bitter realisation that if they wanted to stand any chance in the 2010 election, their party had to be urgently repositioned in the political market. This had to be achieved by making liberal politics more distinguishable from the politics of the socialists, and by convincing liberal voters that the AFD was still the only true representative of liberal politics in Hungary. The first part of the dual task went well: a month after the publication of the survey report the AFD officially quit the second liberal-socialist coalition. The second part of the dual task did not go well at all: in the 2010 the liberal party could not make it into the parliament, and soon after the election became an insignificant political entity.

These three stories about a series of elections, a referendum, and an opinion poll could be easily read as three moderately interesting episodes from the political history of post-communist Hungary. My intention in this paper, however, is to advocate another reading – one that focuses on the multiplicity of numbers on the one hand, and the political implications of that multiplicity on the other. The first and the second story are obviously different. The first is about a people that exercises its sovereign rights through elected representatives, no matter what issue is at stake, while the second is about a people that is expected to make decisions about various issues, no matter who is in government. What a closer look at the numbers, more precisely at the logic of enumeration, associated with elections and referenda indicates, however, is that these two stories are also quite similar: both are about counting heads, that is, calculating the percentage of certain individuals within a political community. It is this similarity that makes the logic of enumeration presented in the third story look radically different. Unlike elections and referenda, opinion polls are about cutting heads: they are predictions about which parties and politicians are likely to fall from power in the near future. As such, what they take for granted (and thus help to perform) is not a people but a political market, where political participation is limited to discreet acts of voting. By juxtaposing counting heads and cutting heads as distinct logics of enumeration, the purpose of this paper is not to critique political markets per se, but to articulate the possibility of doing politics beyond the reality of markets, within democracy.

In this paper I argue that the answer to this tricky question lies in a place largely overlooked by political theorists and social scientists interested in representation practices alike: the Parliament. Drawing on my fieldwork conducted in Hungary, my aim is to show how a parliament building is simultaneously caught up in the definition of a political community, the regulation of the ways in which that community handles political issues, and the establishment of particular connections among those issues. If struggles associated with the first of these logics of representation can be called a ‘politics of who’, and the second a ‘politics of what’, then attending to the third may help to articulate a ‘politics of how’ – that is, a politics concerned with different ways of being political in a liberal democracy.

What are the spatial assumptions of democratic politics? And, conversely, what can we learn about democratic politics if we attend to the ways in which practices are organised spatially? This course aims to address these questions by contrasting the notion of utopias (good places that don’t exist) with that of heterotopias. The latter, according to Michel Foucault, are places that can be treated as ‘effectively enacted utopias’ and, as such, help to reflect upon conflicting understandings of what might count as a perfectly ordered society. How heterotopias might be studied, and with what political effects, will be collectively explored through the discussion a number of empirical case studies on prisons, laboratories, hospitals, and – drawing on the ‘Limits of Democracy’ research programme – parliaments.

Democracy in Central Europe is said to have begun in 1989. This statement is relatively easy to maintain if one defines democracy as the presence of a particular set of abstract institutions and procedures, such as independent legislatures and regularly held elections, but the picture becomes more complicated when one looks at the actual places where democracy happens. Consider the case of the Hungarian Parliament. By today’s standards, the first freely and fairly elected National Assembly was set up only in 1990, but the neo-Gothic building in the center of Budapest, on the east bank of the Danube, which serves as the home of the Hungarian legislature, was commissioned a little more than a hundred years before the collapse of communism. When opened in 1902, it was the largest (and arguably the most impressive) parliament building in the world. How could one account for its existence?

More than two decades after the fall of the Berlin wall, parliamentary democracy appears to be a hegemonic political reality in Europe. Its hegemonic status depends on the continuous elimination of political realities defined in opposition to it, including monarchy, communism and fascism. In this session we examine two sets of memory practices associated with parliamentary democracy as the single best model of governance. By focusing on the work that goes into the making of remembered pasts and forgotten presents, our aim is to problematise this singularity and explore fissures not outside, but within hegemonic formations. The first case explores the writing of a history textbook in Germany and unfolds the practices involved in shaping what counts as worth remembering about the revolution in 1918/19 and the early days of the Weimar republic. The second case explores how conflicting memory practices unfold in the Hungarian parliament building, a gigantic neo-Gothic palace in the centre of Budapest, built at the end of the nineteenth century. Drawing on the two cases, we raise questions about how memory studies can observe the making of memory objects, about non-coherence and messiness, about humanism, and about the analytical concepts we use to explore memory practices (materiality, discourse, text, practices).

If there ever was a formal division of labour within the social sciences as they developed in the nineteenth century, then it was based on a stark distinction between ‘us’ (moderns) and ‘them’ (pre-moderns, non-moderns). The detailed study of the former was claimed to be the task of sociologists, whereas the analysis of the latter was believed to be the business of historians and anthropologists. Although ethnography as a distinct method was developed mostly within anthropology, over the course of the twentieth century it went through several waves of transformation, undermining the ‘us’/’them’ distinction both in a spatial and in a temporal sense. The aim of this course is to deepen students’ understanding of ethnography not by providing a general overview of different ethnographic approaches in the social sciences, but by offering a series of focused discussions and hands-on exercises centred around the making and uses of ethnography’s most sacred objects: ethnographic fieldnotes.

In what sense can numbers be considered as political entities, and what kind of political reality do they help to enact? This course addresses this question by examining the role numbers play in the making of a political community, the strengthening of political legitimacy, the constitution and ongoing performance of a political market, and the formation of political subjects. Using the 2013 German federal election as a specific example, the dual purpose of the course is to shed light on the complex interplay between (social) scientific knowledge and democratic politics on the one hand, and the ways in which this interplay is expressed in various discursive and material practices on the other.

Sociology has often been defined as the study of order in a modern society. In the past decades, Science and Technology Studies (STS) has successfully problematised this definition by shifting attention from single order to multiple orderings, that is, numerous ongoing processes that involve all sorts of entities, from abstract ideas through human bodies to material infrastructures. This course focuses on the role numbers play in socio-technical orderings, highlighting obvious differences and puzzling similarities among such developments as digitalisation, the calculation of risks in economy and public health, the measurement of public opinion, and the governance of climate change.

A tudomány- és technológia tanulmányok (STS) művelése kezdettől fogva politikai intervenció is volt: kutatók a modern tudományok helyszíneinek és gyakorlatainak láthatóvá tételével igyekeztek – és igyekeznek ma is – bemutatni a hatalom és tudás összefonódásának komplex módjait. A részletes empirikus vizsgálatok azonban mostanáig leginkább a tudományos tudás politikai vonatkozásaira összpontosítottak, míg a demokratikus politika, illetve az azzal kapcsolatos tudományok helyszínei és gyakorlatai ritkán kerültek előtérbe. Ebben az előadásban a Lancasteri Egyetem szociológia tanszékén írt doktori disszertációm alapján, a magyar parlament epületén keresztül kívánom bemutatni, hogy hogyan járulhatnak hozzá a tudomány- és technológia tanulmányok a demokratikus politika empirikus elemzéséhez. Formájából és méretéből adódóan a budapesti Országház különösen alkalmas módszertani eszköz annak a megvizsgálására, hogy miféle politikai valóság volt a liberális demokrácia a 19. század végén, hogy mi történt ezzel a politikai valósággal a 20. században, és hogy miként lett ez újra felfedezve és átalakítva a 21. század elején. Ezen átalakulás részletes leírása önmagában is érdekes, ám a legizgalmasabb kérdés mégis az: mindez mennyiben tekinthető politikai intervenciónak? Az előadás ennek a kérdésnek a rövid tárgyalásával zárul.

In the post-Second World War period, sociologists and anthropologists of science in the US, the UK, France, the Netherlands and Western Germany made considerable efforts to problematise scientists’ self-understanding of (scientific) knowledge-making as something external to (democratic) politics. The claim, which from the 1970s onwards came in different shapes and sizes, was that whatever was considered to be scientific was also necessarily political in the sense that it helped to legitimise important decisions and establish and maintain expensive institutions – from nuclear plants through space stations to the internet. But what about the politics of the sociology and anthropology of science itself? This course addresses this question by reviewing recent developments in science and technology studies (STS).

This is an introductory course centred around the concept of practice. It aims to offer a general overview of the so-called practice turn in the social sciences, compare and contrast the most important theories of practice in sociology, and examine a series of case studies in practice research informed by recent developments in cultural anthropology, ethnomethodology, discourse analysis, and science and technology studies.