DEMOCRACY IN PUBLIC THINKING AND THE EMOTIONAL ATMOSPHERE OF SOCIETY

They are essential elements of the emotional atmosphere of society whether or not people perceive inequalities, how much they can accept subordinate and super ordinate relationships, and if they perceive the harmony or disharmony of values and positions in these relationships. In addition to and in place of the tendency of system justification shown and analyzed in depth by social psychology, the experience of contra-selection has been firmly present in the public in Hungary since the change of the political system, in fact, it became even stronger after the sharp political turn in 2010. The main conscious reason of social dissatisfaction is the lack of social security. The research on national representative samples conducted in 2010–2011 revealed the main components of the most common conceptualization of democracy: of these, the components of the belief in democracy showed positive correlations with the critical attitude toward the assumption of contra-selection, and they manifested negative correlations with the tendency of system justification. The factor of the democracy-concept that divided public opinion the most was the demand for a strong state, which, on the other had, went together with system justification, optimism, and the cult of will. The “basic law of Easter”, which put the ideal of a strong state into a legal form, did not meet the dominant expectations of the public.