Housing Advantages for the Better-Connected? Institutional Segmentation,
Settlement Type and Social Network Effects in Hungary’s Late State-Socialist
Housing Inequalities
Judit Bodnár
Central European University, Budapest
&
József Böröcz
Rutgers University, U.S.A.
Abstract
This paper contextualizes the “market transition debate” on the ongoing institutional
transformation of former state socialist societies by examining the system of housing
inequalities in Hungary three years before the regime change. It demonstrates that,
by then, the differentiation of private housing ownership had already been so
advanced that the private-public distinction hides important institutional variation
within “private” ownership. As an alternative, we provide a four-category emic model
of housing institutions for Hungary. The analysis shows that the rules of access to
housing were quite differentiated by settlement type. Hence, the redistributive
predominance of the socialist state weakens as we move from the urban to the rural
context. Finally, we present empirical evidence that informal social network resources
play a distinct role in structuring access to such significant assets as housing.
Much is said nowadays about the power of the past in the post-state-socialist
transformation. One of the key issues at hand, if one aims to understand the current,
apparently chaotic, interplay of the forces of continuity, change, and path
dependence, is the establishment of an image of just how the social system worked
before the collapse of state socialism. Aiming to clarify some prevalent
misunderstandings concerning the point of departure of post-state-socialist social
change, this paper addresses the comparative institutional sociology of state
socialism and its demise through the sociology of housing: it examines the logic of
housing inequalities two-three years before the collapse of state socialism in
Hungary.
This is compelling for three main reasons. First, housing is the bulkiest and most
expensive consumer good, so its (re)distribution affects the structure of inequalities in
any society deeply. This is so much so that the main themes of the comparative
institutional sociology of state socialism have been distilled from a critical sociology of
housing inequalities.
Second, to the extent that urban sociology defines its subject matter as the analysis
of the means of collective consumption, the city is treated widely as a primary,
privileged site where collective consumption is concentrated and can be conveniently
observed. As a result, much of the recent sociological work on state socialism-whose main theoretical significance is in having rearranged the basic structures of
collective consumption--has exhibited an elective affinity to an empirical focus on the
urban. This is especially true for the sociology of housing under state socialism.
While treating the urban as the focus of the analysis of state socialism is often
warranted for reasons of parsimony, it has also often shielded important variation in
the interest, ability, and success, of state socialist policies to mold the housing
institutions as one moves away from the urban context. This creates a need for a
systematic treatment of the variation along the urban-rural dimension as intrinsic to
an institutional analysis of state socialist housing.
Third, as the socialist urban housing ownership structures and, consequently, an
important part of the inherited housing inequalities, are undergoing fast
transformations, there is an acute need for an empirically and conceptually sharper
portrayal of the transformation’s status quo ante. This study draws a baseline for an
analysis of the post-state-socialist housing transformation by making three specific
contributions:
(1) Instead of concentrating, as does much of the literature on state socialist housing
inequality, exclusively on the state-owned sector or the state-vs-private dichotomy,
we demonstrate the segmentation of housing provisions by a more complex
taxonomy of institutional types derived from a summary of the basic emic categories
of institutional distinction.
(2) Instead of focussing, as is conventionally done, on the urban context or its various
parts, our models encompass the entire society. Thus, we treat the splitting of the
system of housing provisions by settlement categories as intrinsic to our analysis.
(3) Finally, instead of an exclusive focus on normative mechanisms of valorization--a
feature of the literature on housing stratification--we also test the effects of such
relational assets as formal and informal social networks as resources under late state
socialism on housing inequalities.
This requires, first, a description of the institutional landscape in housing provisions in
late-state-socialist Hungary. The empirical tests use general social survey data from
Hungary, 1986-87.
Institutional Segmentation and Geographical Disparities in Housing
Common views of housing under state socialism present a picture of an essentially
redistributive system. For that image to be correct empirically, reality should be
characterized by the predominance, if not outright monopoly, of state-owned housing
solutions where usage rights are distributed among citizens through a mechanism
that matches individuals and families with housing provisions on a bureaucratic basis.
Very useful as a heuristic to throw light on the logic of housing allocation mechanisms
under the early, Stalinist patterns of state socialist housing policies, any such
portrayal of the housing system in late-state-socialist Hungary is strikingly “off.” By
the mid-1980s, Hungary had evolved a highly differentiated system of housing
institutions, featuring a variety of institutional arrangements that was more closely
2
reminiscent of that found in capitalist societies than the above imagery of a generic
state socialist housing system. A four-category model of Hungary’s repertoire of
housing institutions--incorporating considerations pertaining to ownership, rules of
access and some basic physical features of the building (the single-family unit vs
multi-family building contrast) is presented in Table 1. These four types capture the
main emic categories of housing institutions in the Hungary of the mid-1980s.
Political significance and numerical preponderance of state-owned housing (called in
Hungary tanácsi lakás or, ‘council apartment’) is the institutional category often used
as the differentia specifica of housing under state socialism. Council housing was first
created by the confiscation by the state of a large proportion of that part of urban
multi-storey, multi-unit commercial housing dwellings which had survived the second
world war in an inhabitable condition. After minor initial repairs and often the radical
partition of the larger units so obtained, this housing stock was swiftly pronounced a
public good and redistributed to families through leases assigned to the head of the
family. For those large units not carved up, this often involved the creation of cotenancies (the placement of multiple families in a single housing unit), a feature that
took the ensuing forty-some years to disappear almost completely. The initial stock of
council housing was gradually augmented as new housing construction by the state
caught on--using mainly prefab concrete block technology in large housing estates
on the outskirts of the largest cities--a practice that accelerated in the late 1960s and
peaked in the 1970s. New housing construction by the Hungarian state for council
housing had come to an almost complete halt before 1986-87, the years of the
survey we use.
Because of the striking differences in the use value of the units so created, the stateowned housing stock was extremely stratified. Its spectrum ranged from dark, wet,
poorly ventilated, noisy, one-room chambers in tenement-style buildings at the rough
parts of the cities through cleaner, well-lit but rigidly built, noisy, mid-size (50 to 80
m2) prefab units in housing estates, box-shaped, single-family buildings on tiny plots
and high-ceiling and originally very comfortable but often ill-maintained downtown
housing units to large, luxurious villa apartments in the surrounding, quiet and clean
areas (e.g., in Budapest, the Buda Hills). Location-specific access to such public
goods as Hungary’s then still clean, fast, cheap and reliable urban public
transportation system, the proximity of schools, shopping, cultural and medical
institutions of various kinds, etc. added further dimensions of housing inequality
within the category of council-housing. Because allocation decisions concerning
council apartments were made by the high-level administrative personnel of the local
state organs (‘councils’) behind closed doors and because variation in rents reflected
only the unit’s size and the presence/absence of basic hygienic and comfort facilities
but it was completely insensitive to location, style of the building, state of repair of the
building and the unit, the institutional form of council housing was a site of intense
social inequality and tension.
As a consequence of turn-of-the-century central European semiperipheral patterns of
urban development, grave housing inequalities often manifested themselves within
one building: In the buildings erected after the turn of the century in today’s
downtown areas, the larger second-, third-, and fourth-floor apartments facing the
street front received all the sunlight and provided opportunities for lifestyles quite
closely reminiscent of the conduct of Budapest’s fin-de-siecle elites (see, e.g., Hanák
3
1984). Crucial to understanding the complexities of housing under state socialism,
the use value and prestige offered by the best of these high-quality apartments far
exceeded much of private housing. In contrast, some other units--perhaps those on
the lower floors and certainly those without windows to the street, opening only to the
courtyard (udvari lakás)--appeared as if constructed for the servants of those living in
the frontal section. As tenants in all of those units paid the same rent per square
meter to the state-landlord, this offered yet an additional feature contributing to the
inequalities coded in the system of housing provisions. Thus, what appears in
summary statistics as relatively low levels of inner-city residential segregation in
central European state socialist societies often conceals high levels of pronounced
social inequality within the council-owned apartment building.
Besides state-owned council housing, there existed three basic institutional types of
private dwellings. Co-op apartments (szövetkezeti lakás) featured private ownership
with limited initial access: Because of the state subsidies channeled into such
construction (an institutional form spreading from the late 1960s on), selection
decisions concerning the first owners were made by the building institution, usually
the National Savings Bank--the state-owned retail bank providing, at that time, over
eighty percent of consumer banking services in Hungary--that performed, in this
scheme, some of the state’s gatekeeping functions. Access to condominia
(öröklakás) and family houses (családi ház) was not restricted by administrative
means; the difference between those two private means of housing was due to the
type of building structure (condominia are located in multi-unit buildings while family
houses are single-family units). This also suggested locational differences
(condominia characterize more densely populated inner areas while family houses
represent a lower-density type, found typically on the outskirts of cities). The
stratification of private housing, when considered “in kind,” was, thus, as wide as that
of council apartments: Location, unit size and facilities, age and style of building,
state of disrepair, access to public transportation, distance from the urban areas or
from city centers were all factored into the perceived relative value of such housing.
As a result, for most people the hunt for better housing virtually never stopped. Ability
to optimize one’s position in this highly differentiated system was the most important
socioeconomic preoccupation and a marker of major social success in late-statesocialist Hungary.
In sum, neither the available institutional types nor the Hungarian population’s
distribution among the four main categories in the mid-1980s supports any easy
conceptual contrast between “socialism vs. capitalism.” As the bottom row in Table 2
suggests, only 24.4% of the respondents of the country’s population resided in stateowned apartments in 1986: More than three of four Hungarian adults experienced the
collapse of state socialism while living in a privately owned dwelling.
The distribution of the four main types of housing institutions varied by settlement
type (the ? between institutional types and settlement types in Table 2 is .58). Over
half of the citizens of the capital city lived in council housing while only a mere 4.5%
of those in the rural areas had access to such solutions for their housing needs.
94.4% of Hungary’s villagers inhabited family houses while less than one-fifth of
those in Budapest did so. The towns other than Budapest fell somewhere in the
middle in all institutional types except for condominia (whose share was slightly
higher in the towns than in Budapest). Thus, when considering institutional patterns
4
of housing, most “ready” for capitalist housing property ownership were Hungary’s
villagers. Meanwhile, roughly one-half of the population of the capital city still lived in
council housing in the late eighties.
Compounding the differentiation of the Hungarian housing system was the fact that
the severity of the bureaucratism of the state’s involvement in the allocation of council
apartments gradually subsided, especially since the 1970s. In concert with the
general softening of the bureaucratic elements in the management of the economy
after the introduction of the economic reforms of 1968 and thereafter, state-owned
housing units came to be subject to transfers among citizens in ways that often
circumvented, bracketed, or diminished the significance of, the bureaucratic
allocation process. This was made possible by some remarkable features of the
apartment lease agreement (lakásbérleti szerzôdés), the contract assigning the right
of occupying a council apartment to an individual once a housing allocation decree
(lakáskiutalás) was made by the local housing authority (a department of the local or,
in Budapest, district, councils). The scope of the rights transferred to the tenant in
state socialist housing leases far exceeded the rental rights stipulated in private lease
agreements familiar from capitalist economies. The rights gained by obtaining a lease
from the socialist state approximated ownership rights in many respects. The
following is a list of the three most significant such features.
•
Once a council apartment was assigned to an individual, the lease was
inheritable in a manner modelled after Hungarian inheritance law concerning
private property.
•
Council apartments were also exchangeable. At first, such exchanges had
been allowed only between council apartments; later that restriction was lifted
so that it became legal to exchange state-owned housing for privately owned
units. Initial restrictions on the exchanges of units between settlements,
especially those involving housing in Budapest, were also lifted soon. As
compensation for value discrepancies between the units exchanged, monetary
payments were allowed in such transactions. Transfers involving state-owned
housing units required explicit consent from the housing authority as, legally,
such transactions involved reassignment of the allocation decree from one
individual to another and the establishment of a new lease with the state.
Except for sporadic discrepancies, such permits were granted with relative
ease and speed. Because leases to council apartments could not be bought-i.e., their initial allocation was a monopoly of the state landlord--purchasing
private real estate with very low value and then exchanging it, along with an
accompanying cash payment, for valuable council apartments became an
important, perfectly legal way in which council housing could be obtained by
those who saw little chance of ever receiving a housing allocation decree on
the merit of their application (i.e., the vast majority of the population). This also
often created three- or even four-element real estate exchange chains where
flows of value, subsidies, and monetary compensation, were extremely difficult
to sort out even in the rare occasion that the housing authority cared to pursue
its own official policies, and enforce its regulations, vigorously. If exchanges
involved housing units in multiple settlements or in different districts in
Budapest, the authorities’ ability to follow the often quite intricate details of
these housing exchange deals was further reduced. The transferability of
5
council housing and the resulting opaqueness of the decision making process
regarding housing allocation of course created enormous additional
opportunities and incentives for corruption, graft, and many other forms of
illegality and queue jumping.
•
Council apartments could also be used to generate rental income. Subleasing
(albérlet) was the most obvious method of adjusting to spot shortages of
housing (most pressing in Budapest and the other industrial and college
towns). The law forbade subleasing entire council-owned units--i.e., the lease
holder was legally obligated to be living in the same unit as the subrenters--but
this point of the law was, again, hardly enforceable. A conceptually very
important, “grey” secondary rental housing market thus emerged, with
sublease rental rates exceeding several times the rents paid by the unit’s
officially sanctioned occupant--called the “main tenant” or, fôbérlô--to the state.
Such subleasing of council apartments became an important feature of
Hungary’s emerging, highly diversified second economy.
As a result, Hungary’s system of housing provisions was, by the mid-1980s,
thoroughly monetized. Although actual payment in full for housing was a feature of
condominia and family houses only, and despite the lack of any effective housing
mortgage scheme for housing purchases other than those bought directly from the
state, the idea that housing value was translatable into monetary value was firmly set:
Not only private dwellings but, importantly, also state-owned council housing was
widely treated as a class of assets with monetary value. This deep (initially
completely informal, later gradually more and more openly pronounced, yet officially
quite quasi-)monetization of state-owned housing value was, in turn, explicitly
recognized by the state itself when, in the early 1970s, it began requiring an
“occupation fee” from newly assigned main tenants of council apartments. Although
this fee never approximated the presumable down payment payable after the
presumable market value of such units, it was substantial enough to work as an
unambiguous political-economic indicator of a major concession by the state to the
rampant conceptual monetization of state-owned apartments.
The transferability of council apartments and their utility for creating rental incomes
was somewhat restricted by the attendant administrative constraints. This fact was
duly reflected in the consistently lower estimates people made of the value of council
apartments in housing-related transactions. That, however, did not stop society from
considering usage rights embodied in the lease to state-owned housing as an
important form of monetary asset. Monetary calculations were widely used in
establishing the amount of payment, not only for private housing purchases, but also
for housing exchanges.
One implication of this late-state-socialist institutional diversity in housing, its
systematic association with settlement type, and the resulting striking social
inequalities in housing, was that the two housing privatization drives (transfers of
council apartments to their tenants at deeply-discounted prices) that took place
during the years immediately ensuing the 1989 collapse of state socialism affected
the country’s population in radically different ways and to very different degrees.
Grasping the logic of late-state-socialist inequalities is thus indispensable if we are to
gain a more precise understanding of the dynamics and consequences of
6
subsequent privatization. That is what this paper attempts, using data from three
years before the collapse of state socialism.
Housing Inequalities under State Socialism
With such institutional diversity, geographical variety and monetization, any housing
system was bound to display a great amount of inequality. This was recognized very
early and housing inequalities served as proving ground for some important,
paradigmatic theories of social inequality and class under state socialism.
This area of intellectual and research endeavors owes by far most to the work of Iván
Szelényi. Szelényi’s unwavering empirical interest in housing inequalities has been
couched in a comparative theory of social formations. Framing his argument in a
debate with what he saw as both theoretically naive and empirically ill-informed
analyses of socialism, he insisted that the basic structure of inequalities under state
socialism had to be understood as produced by the redistributive mechanism of the
state socialist state so that, “curiously enough, the interests of the powerless and
disprivileged can be best served with increasingly transactive (and consequently
market-like) relationships in the economic system” (Szelényi 1978, p. 63.). With an
empirical focus exclusively (1) on the urban context (2) during the 1960s to early
1970s (when indeed the vast majority of new urban housing construction took place
under the auspices of the state in Hungary) he duly and very eloquently emphasized
the redistributive features of housing arrangements. The upshot of this in terms of a
contrastive theory of social formations was that, indeed, “the changes occurring in
Eastern Europe during the early fifties were qualitatively different, they transformed
housing economy from a market economy into a redistributive one, through housing,
the State not merely reallocated market generated income as in the case of Welfare
capitalist societies, but redistributed surplus” (Szelényi 1978, p. 65). Specifically,
[a]s in a capitalist Welfare society the poor is housed by the council and the rich buy
or rent on the market (monopolising the advantages of home ownership), in State
socialism professionals and the “middle class” (clerical workers and workers
aristocracy) has the privilege to rent the heavily subsidized State housing and the
working class has to buy or build on the market. [ . . . ] Consequently, [ . . . ] social
inequalities after housing are greater than before housing; if we want to measure the
real extent of inequalities, we have to take into account the subsidies in better
housing allocated systematically to the more well-to-do (Szelényi 1978, p. 67).
As “under conditions of this particular type of redistributive economy [ . . . ] the
surplus as such is basically defined by political power” (Szelényi 1978, p. 73),
beneficiaries of this system of inequality are the “intellectuals” seen as an emerging
ruling class entity in the process of formation from such disparate groups as the
political cadre elites of the Communist party and the educated elites (Konrád and
Szelényi 1979[1974], Böröcz 1989). There was also the admirably honest and careful
admission that this ruling class was, at best, in statu nascendi and the qualification
that it was likely “the most miserable privileged class in the history of mankind”
(Szelényi 1978, p. 77).
7
This compelling argument came under fire from an empirical angle. Hungarian urban
sociologists József Hegedûs (1987) and Iván Tosics (1987) questioned the validity of
Szelényi’s argument on the basis that they found the opposite of what one would
expect from Szelényi’s theories: In 1982-83--i.e., almost a generation after the
gathering of Szelényi’s data--they find in a survey taken “in two middle-sized
Hungarian cities, having 60-80 thousand inhabitants” (Hegedûs 1987, p. 80), that the
market does not play a direct welfare role as there are no entire social strata which
are forced to the market. Furthermore, the market does not play an indirect welfare
role through turnover processes. To sum up, we cannot say that the market works
functionally or ‘well’, in the sense that it does not produce filtration as one might
expect. Nor can we say in any sense it compensates for social inequalities (Hegedûs
1987, p. 91).
In a clear reference to Szelényi’s work, Hegedûs adds, as we know from empirical
studies in the sixties, poor people had much less access to state housing than the
upper-middle class and they were forced into the market. This was a market with very
few real market transactions, since people mainly built their own homes themselves [
. . . ] These [private] houses were sometimes very poor and the construction period
might last for years. There was also another market where people entered not so
much because they could not get state housing but because they did not want to live
in it. (The new housing estates quite quickly lost their ‘attractive’ force; but as they
were heavily subsidized not so rapidly as their west European counterparts.)
(Hegedûs 1987, p. 91.)
The Hegedûs and Tosics vs. Szelényi controversy is easily settled by the explicit
introduction of the historical dimension. As Bodnár (1996b) points out using RónaTas’ (1994) periodization of the transformation, the two apparently conflicting
observations are both plausible if understood as referring to two distinct historical
epochs. Hegedûs and Tosics’ data from 1982-83 cannot falsify Szelényi’s analysis
based on data from the 1960s if we have reason to argue that they simply address
two different periods. Hegedûs and Tosics’ findings thus do not invalidate Szelényi’s
original analysis. Instead, they call for reanalysis. The logical conclusion is that, by
the early 1980s, Hungary had entered into a new phase wherein the dynamics of
social inequalities in housing took a different form so that market forces could not
perform the inequality-reducing role they had played in the earlier period when they
served essentially as small-scale correctives to an overarching redistributive
mechanism. This indeed is one possible reading of the essence of Szelényi’s
response to the Hegedûs-Tosics critique (Szelényi 1987) as well as Hegedûs’
conclusion (quoted above).
In making these arguments, it was necessary for both sides to simplify their portrayal
of the institutional arrangement. In his early empirical studies, Szelényi focussed on
council housing, particularly in new housing estates in medium-sized towns (not
Budapest). In his conceptual work he clearly recognized the existence of the “mixed”
nature of the housing economy but this notion, exactly like Hegedûs and Tosics’
typology later, goes to great lengths in aligning the institutional variety of housing
8
arrangements alongside the state/nonstate dichotomy. (“Mixing” refers to the two
classes of property ownership: state vs. private.) Given the debate’s theoretical
interest in locating the ultimate source of inequality and the assumption, accepted by
both parties, that the “market” element is significantly more closely associated with
private property than state ownership, this is clearly warranted.
There is, however, a very important sense of variation that is inadvertently lost due to
the simplification of attention to the dichotomy of state-owned vs. private dwellings.
Owning a condominium or a co-op unit signifies a location in the Hungarian matrix of
housing inequality that is very different from owning a family house. The same is true
of the practice of abstracting away from rural (and sometimes even metropolitan)
housing arrangements: Ownership of a family house in Budapest is clearly unlike
ownership of a house in a small village as for the life world, institutional constellation,
and quality of life it offers. We aim to rectify this by using (1) the four-category emic
model of institutional outcomes and (2) an empirical test that includes the entire
Hungarian society, thus accounting for variation according to settlement type.
Yet another side of the issue of late state socialist housing inequalities is, however,
masked in the controversy around the relative significance of “redistribution” and
“state.” Plainly put, the “formation-theory” approach allows precious little by way of
the demonstration of the mechanisms that actually produce and reproduce housing
inequalities. In other words, preoccupation with the important debate about the
relative significance of “redistribution” and “market” has had the unintended
consequence of hiding a more generic concern, the subject matter par excellence of
stratification studies: the valorization of individual and collective assets through both
normative and relational mechanisms. As the phenomenon of social networks is
prevalent in both late-twentieth-century types of modern society--state socialism and
welfare capitalism--this was bound to become the key issue of sociological analyses
of the transformations from a late version of the one to some, yet unclear version of
the other. If we are able to explicate the main mechanisms of the valorization of
individual and collective assets under late state socialism, we have laid a basis from
which a systematic analysis of the transformation after state socialism can proceed.
Our interest lies in this area.
Network Effects on Economic Outcomes under State Socialism
Much of the tradition in conventional stratification studies ignores relational assets
entirely and, so, in effect assumes normative mechanisms of asset valorization. In
indirect challenge to this assumption, there has emerged work emphasizing the
advantage-producing effects of social networks. This builds on work, for analyses of
late state socialism, on the organizational concomitants of a primarily, or at least
significantly, social-network-organized economy (e.g., Czakó and Sik 1987, Szalai
1990, Stark 1989, Róna-Tas 1990, Böröcz 1990, Böröcz 1993b, 1993c, 1996), and
the effects of differential access to various kinds of social networks on the distribution
of social advantages (Angelusz and Tardos 1991, Böröcz and Southworth 1995). An
important part of the discussion is focussed around the issue of contending
interpretations of the formal/informal distinction. Work of great influence by Alejandro
Portes and members of his school has considered formality vs. informality as aspects
of economic sectors. There is great elective affinity between those two important
threads of research: sectoral informality under state socialism and capitalism.
9
Conceptual tools of the formal-vs-informal-sector approach as developed for
capitalism have also been applied to state socialism (Portes and Böröcz 1988).
Another, logically just as plausible, position is to consider informality as conceptually
independent of sectoral distinctions. This is suggested, in the first place, by the
remarkable power accorded to informal social network ties in Hungarian culture. This
is revealed, for housing in the seventies, in a remarkable critical-ethnographic essay
on informality in Hungary by János Kenedi (1981), a work that foreshadows much of
the subsequent economic sociology of the informal sector. Endre Sik (1988) provides
a most accurate sociological analysis tying informality to provisions in the most costly
consumer good, housing, especially to housing construction. Those two approaches
justly emphasize the significance of network ties to such construction professionals
as bricklayers, plumbers, etc.
In an alternative approach, Böröcz (1997) drafts a historical-comparative analysis as
background to analyzing of networks and hierarchies as mechanisms of social
closure. This leads to a more general analysis suggesting the operation of the
network principle as an important reproduction mechanism of social inequality.
According to the latter train of thought, ties to people with “higher” or, more
pronounced forms of, historically inherited and reproduced systems of prestige and
privilege would be expected to produce social advantages.
There is ample comparative evidence pointing in the same direction. Work on China,
for instance, has long emphasized the significance of quanxi, or “connections” in
accessing valuable resources. Recent work by Min Zhou and John Logan (1996)
conceptualizes the informal network principle of quanxi as a separate explanatory
variable of access to housing in socialist China, additional to both formal networks
and normative assets: After market reforms, distribution of housing “follows criteria
similar to those before market reforms, such as rank, seniority, merit, loyalty, and
quanxi connections” (Zhou and Logan, 1996, p. 418). Logan, Bian and Bian (ms)
demonstrate empirically the independent effects of informal network assets on
housing in urban China.
In the European state socialist context, Böröcz and Southworth (1995) argue,
separating the formality/informality dimension from sectoral distinctions is a crucially
important analytical step because the most important sectoral distinction under state
socialism--the state vs. private contrast--does not absorb the distinction between
informality and formality. To do this, Böröcz and Southworth (op.cit.) move the
distinction of formality vs. informality from being features of economic sectors “down”
to the level of transactions. They propose a three-by-two classification scheme that
allows the separation of formal and informal transactions taking place either within
the state-owned sector, within the private sector or in the area where the two overlap.
Valorization of individual and collective assets is thus seen as occurring in the threeby-two conceptual space of state / nonstate / overlap sectors by formal / informal
mechanisms of valorization.
When, in the latter part of the literature on relational assets, it comes to tallying the
advantages produced by social networks, attention has been focussed almost
entirely on earnings inequalities. While understandable from a statistical perspective
and fully warranted from a substantive point of view, that focus is, clearly, partial: It
10
reveals advantages of the “flow”-type and turns attention away from “stock” aspects
of inequality and advantage. This a shortcoming for several reasons. First,
irrespective of the state socialist character of the economies under study, in any
society characterized by relatively low levels of remuneration and the resultant,
relatively moderate, levels of earnings inequalities, this would lead to a somewhat
toned-down representation of a complex system of economic inequalities.
The state socialist character of the societies under study places, second, a greater
emphasis on access to resources in kind, particularly on resources in durable goods,
be they privately owned or public goods under substantive private control. Housing
represents the most important of such “stock”-type resources and, it is only
appropriate that the most influential theories concerning the nature of social
inequalities under state socialism should have emerged from work on differential
access to housing under state socialism.
Data
The data come from TÁRKI-I and TÁRKI-III, two phases of a general social survey of
Hungary executed as a cooperative effort by the Sociology Institute of the Eötvös
Loránd University, the Mass Communication Research Center, and the Association
for Social Research and Informatics, in late 1986--early 1987. It utilizes a three-step
stratified sample (n=2963) of the country's adult civilian population.
In modelling housing inequalities under late state socialism, we ask two fundamental
questions:
•
•
What social characteristics place individuals and families in various positions
in the institutional system of housing provisions? Specifically, is it possible to
demonstrate the marginal effects of social network resources once the usual
producers of advantage have been controlled for?
Given the widespread monetization of housing assets, what determines the
perceived monetary value of the housing unit once social inequalities in the
institutional forms of housing provisions is in place? Specifically, is there a
systematic marginal advantage to social networks resources?
The dependent variables for the first question are, thus, the four institutional
outcomes listed in the first part of the paper, i.e., the condition that respondent
lawfully occupies (1) a council apartment (the state-owned variant), (2) a co-op unit,
(3) a condominium, or (4) a family house. Multinomial logit is the appropriate
statistical model for estimating the differential likelihood of occupying one of the four
items of housing institutions. (We use family house as the omitted category of
comparison and present models for council housing, co-op and condominium
ownership). For the second question, we are fortunate to have in this general social
survey an item in which the respondent estimates the monetary value of the housing
unit in which s/he lives. This includes, in concert with the monetization of the housing
economy in Hungary, outlined above, council housing units as well. Our analysis will
take the 10-based logarithm of this estimated monetary value and model its
determinants via a series of Ordinary Least Squares regression equations (Table 3
lists the means and standard deviations of all variables used in the models).
11
As predictor variables, we introduce, first, a battery of baseline variables used
conventionally to address the normative mechanisms of asset valorization in state
socialist societies. In the choice of these, we build on Böröcz and Southworth (1995
and 1996). This includes age as a quadratic function, a dummy variable representing
the respondent’s gender, and we add another dummy marking Roma families--the
only ethnic group that is systematically discriminated-against in Hungary. As at the
time of the survey official council housing assignment policies had still quite explicitly
adhered to the rule of considering family size and structure, we also introduce
separate variables to account for the number of children and whether the unit is
occupied by a single- or multi-adult family (the latter is marked “TOGETHER” and
includes both married and unmarried couples but excludes co- and sub-tenancies).
Educational credentials are represented through the presence of diplomas from
secondary and tertiary school (Böröcz and Southworth 1996). Effects of membership
in the Communist Party are similarly controlled-for.
Logan, Bian and Bian (ms) use, in the Chinese urban context, “access to authority
through others (guanxi)” (10) as a key variable in explaining housing inequalities.
They operationalize guanxi through two variables: “whether a close relative is a party
member or administrator and the respondent’s reported relationship with the work
unit leader” (10). The latter is coded on an eight-point scale ranging from none to
“terrific” (10). We take a different approach for three reasons. First, the use of close
relatives is, based on the “strength of weak ties” argument, problematic as an
operational measure of informal ties. Second, the structure of workplace authority
and the resultant structure of potential advantages in late-state-socialist Hungary was
vastly different from that under the much stricter Chinese system. Consequently,
closeness of the relationship to boss may not be a fortuitous measure of informal
network ties.
Third, there is a precedent study to which ours connects through site, topic, time, and
even data set. Given the results of Böröcz and Southworth (1995)--who present
separate, significant earnings generating effects for formal network assets (measured
by the number of subordinates at the workplace) as well as informal network assets
(represented in the self-reported number of people the respondent knows who have
tertiary diplomas)--we use the same measures to predict advantages in housing. We
think self-reported number of ties to individuals with assets widely known to be
important determinants of advantage in modern, state socialist societies--tertiary
education--is the optimal form of informal social network assets we can provide with
this survey evidence from Hungary.
As the housing allocation decree plays an important part in the formal way of
obtaining council housing (an advantage that, due to the exchangeability of housing
assets, can be expected to contribute to access to private housing as well), we also
introduce a dichotomous variable to mark those who have ever received housing in
the form of a grant deed of right to rent a council-apartment.
In the models estimating the value of housing assets, we use the same predictor
variables as above and append them with dummy variables for each housing
institution type (with family house as the omitted variable), the size of the unit
(measured by the 10-based logarithm of the floor size) and income (again in the 10based log form).
12
Findings
Tables 4, 5 and 6 show the results of our multinomial logit analysis of the log
likelihood that respondent resides in a council-owned apartment (Table 4), a co-op
unit (Table 5) or a condominium (Table 6) in 1986. (The omitted comparison category
is, thus, family house.) Each of the following tables presents the results for Hungary
overall, and then breaks them down by settlement type (thus featuring separate
columns for the subsamples of Budapest, the towns and the villages).
These results describe a highly differentiated institutional system of housing
provisions. They clearly confirm the analytical decision to treat the four institutional
types and the three settlement types as relatively separate spaces.
Looking at the national-level results (contained in the first columns of Tables 4, 5 and
6) first, we see that education is a positive asset in all three institutional forms. While
statistically significant in all three institutional forms, the magnitude of the advantages
associated with secondary and tertiary education are greater among those residing in
co-op units and greatest for occupants of condominia. This is consistent with the
argument that, by the time of late state socialism, the commercialization of housing
had been so advanced that redistributive advantages had been counterbalanced by
market-based advantages to such an extent that both secondary and tertiary
education produce about twice as steep returns in the likelihood of condominium
residence than in the arena of council housing (logit coefficients of 1.38*** vs. .688***
for secondary school and 1.25*** vs. .566** for tertiary diplomas). The fact that the
coefficients of the educational attainment-related predictor variables are positive in all
three categories of housing suggests that the institutional niche of the ‘family house’
is occupied mainly by those on the low end of the spectrum of educational
attainment. This in turn indicates that lumping together co-op and condominium
residents with those living in a family house--a category that would result from
considering only the fact that they all represent privately owned dwellings-would
create a grouping that would be very mixed as for one of the most important
determinants of social structural position in a state socialist society, educational
attainment. That would hide important variation.
When taking those observations together with the result that having ever received a
lease decree is a significant, non-trivial positive determinant of co-op and
condominium residence (as well as, obviously, of residence in a council-unit), the
logical conclusion is that these results reflect a fairly advanced point in a historical
movement, during state socialism, by the educated strata from council to co-op and
condominium housing.
This interpretation is supported further by the estimated effects of political affiliation:
The positive effect of communist party membership is not significant statistically
precisely at the point where one would expect it, on the basis of the formation theory
approach, to be most powerful: in facilitating access to council housing. On the other
hand, party membership is a statistically significant positive determinant of the
likelihood of residence in co-ops and condominia. This, again, suggests that, by the
mid-to-late 1980s, the privileged strata of late state socialist Hungary had gradually
shifted their residential patterns away from council housing, in favor of cooperative
and condominia. Again, it is important to stress that this shift is not to “private
13
ownership” per se: family house--in fact the most numerous category of private
housing (more than 60% of all housing belongs in this category according to our
survey data, see Table 2)--represents a radically different kind of social mix.
This interpretation is brought out most forcefully by the coefficients estimating the
relative importance of formal social network assets. These (measured in the
approximate number of subordinates at the workplace) are practically irrelevant for
any of the housing institutions presented here, except for council housing in the
towns (urban areas other than Budapest) where their effect is negative.
Informal social network ties to people with tertiary diplomas produce, on the other
hand, quite powerful results. The coefficients estimating the statistical effects of such
informal network assets on the likelihood of occupying a council-owned, co-op or a
condominium unit are positive and statistically significant, in spite of the fact that they
appear in the context of a model that already controls for rather precise measures of
educational attainment (which in all likelihood co-varies with the extent of informal
ties to those with tertiary diplomas) and age (which is known to be related to informal
network assets in general). Despite this conservativeness of our model, we find the
number of people with tertiary diplomas in respondent’s informal social network to be
a positive determinant of all three institutional categories--with council and
condominium housing featuring coefficients of almost exactly the same magnitude
(.257*** and .250***, respectively.)
There is important variation according to settlement type. Because of the smaller
number of cases in each category, significance levels are, in general, lower. In this
light, it is particularly noticeable that membership in the Communist Party is most
significant as the positive predictor of residence in a condominia in the towns. It
appears that, in Budapest, occupying condominia is most strongly associated with
educational attributes and the role of party membership is negligible, while political
affiliation retains much of its power in the towns. Meanwhile, informal network assets
in the towns are moderately important predictors of living in a council-unit, yet they do
not produce any particularly strong positive effect for co-op and condo occupancy in
the towns. Access to the rare categories of council units and condominia in the
village setting (the three together accounting for a mere 5.6% of all rural housing, as
in Table 2) is very strongly associated with the extent of informal social networks
connecting respondent to those with tertiary diplomas. This suggests that the
categories of co-op and condo living in the village context can be thought of as
miniature enclaves in the countryside engaged in imitating urban housing institutions-a pursuit of the moderately educated rural elites (the coefficients for tertiary
education in rural council housing and condominia are .225 and .360, respectively-both positive although neither reaches the one-tailed p<.1 level of statistical
significance). The outstanding positive effects of having ever been awarded a lease
decree (with coefficients of 2.55**, 3.32** and 2.87*) on residence in council housing,
co-op units and condominia in the villages also suggests that these institutions
represent personal histories of “success” in social distinction under state socialist
rules of achievement, mixed with traces of a “quasi-urban” habitus in the rural
context.
Table 7 summarizes the results of our OLS regression analysis using the 10-based
logarithm of the estimated value of the respondent’s housing unit as its criterion
14
variable. Again, the most fundamental finding is that the coefficients reflect very
distinct mechanisms for the three settlement-type subsamples, justifying our
insistence on treating them as relatively separate valorization mechanisms.
As expected, educational achievement is a strong, positive, and statistically very
significant contributor to access to highly valued housing. All traces of positive effects
by the two most important “formation theory” predictors--Communist Party
membership and number of subordinates at the workplace--are absent. All other
things equal, council-housing is valued consistently below family houses (they
produce a metric coefficient of -.133*** with ‘family house’ as the comparison
category), while condominia represent the most valuable housing institution (with a
coefficient of .158***), even after controlling for unit size.
Respondent’s income is a positive but, on the national level, statistically nonsignificant contributor to the value of the housing unit. This suggests that the
conversion of “flow” type advantages to value in housing “stock” is not obvious at all
in late state socialist Hungary. On this basis, and considering that even in the only
model where income effects are statistically significant (the villages) the effect of the
other predictor variables is not wiped out by income, we conclude that it is justified to
consider the value of housing, a “stock” aspect of socioeconomic advantages, as
relatively independent of the magnitude of income flows under late state socialism.
Having ever been awarded a lease decree is also a positive, but minor and, with the
exception of Budapest, a statistically not significant, contributor to the value of
housing assets. We interpret this as a strong confirmation of the analytical approach
to state socialism as made up of a series of periods with rather radically different
rules. While lease decrees play an important role in determining which housing
category is available for respondents, its impact on the value of the housing unit
occupied is nearly negligible by the mid-1980s. Except for Budapest (which is the
settlement category with the highest proportion of council housing units--55.8%-- at
the time of our survey, see Table 2), the effects of the allocative practices of the
socialist state are practically negligible already three years before the collapse of
state socialism in Hungary.
Not so with informal social networks. These data testify to the resilience of informal
networks under large-scale social change. The number of people with tertiary
education in respondent’s informal social networks is a positive net contributor to the
value of the respondent’s housing unit in every category except Budapest. As is the
case typically with informal social networks measures included in survey data, the
magnitude of these effects tends to be rather small but, given that they are
embedded in models that already explain a rather large proportion--30% to 40%--of
the variance in the dependent variable, those effects still remain noteworthy from a
conceptual point of view. Given that most survey-based stratification work on
socioeconomic advantages tends to remain silent about social-network-related
effects, and informality in general, we think these results are not trivial.
Variation by settlement type is, again, quite important. Female-headed households
enjoy no advantage in terms of the value of their unit only in Budapest; the value of
the housing unit occupied by respondent is lower if the occupant is a member of the
Roma minority, but this effect is statistically significant only in the rural context;
15
educational achievement does not produce advantages in housing value in the
villages other than through income and informal social networks to others with
diplomas; and the relative return on unit size (measured in floor space m2) is the
greatest in Budapest. Finally, the explanatory power of this model is noticeably
stronger for Budapest (R2adj=.4016) than for towns (R2adj=.3212) or for villages
(R2adj=.3339).
Conclusion and Discussion
Our data demonstrate:
•
•
the differentiation of the system of housing provisions before the collapse of
state socialism by institutional types and settlement types, and
the presence of relational resources, especially the extent of informal social
networks to people with higher education, beyond the well-known normative
advantages associated with educational and political affiliation, as positive
determinants of housing advantages.
The predictors of the likelihood of residence in all three of the housing institutions we
observe in Tables 4, 5 and 6 (council housing, cooperative and condominium living)
are substantially different from the omitted category (family housing). In other words,
the mechanism that places people in the “private” institutional form of the family
house is different not only from that of council housing--a result expected from a
“formation theory” standpoint--but also from the other two main institutions of private
housing, co-op and condominium residence.
A comparison of the columns for the different settlement categories in Tables 4, 5, 6
and 7 reveals remarkable differences not only in the statistical strength and
magnitude, but sometimes even in the direction, of the effect mechanisms. From this
it appears not only that the redistributive functions of the late state socialist state
were most pronounced in the urban setting and least detectable in the countryside,
but that this also implied the emergence of a very complex system of housing
provisions. This system operated in the institutional space of the three-by-four table
(Budapest / towns / villages X council / co-op / condo / family house) presented as
Table 2. The logistic regressions presented in our paper suggest that the processes
taking place in each of the twelve cells of that three-by-four table are substantially
different.
To the extent that the mid-to-late 1980s represented the erosion phase of state
socialism in Hungary, the findings of our study also recontextualize the ongoing
market transition debate. These results suggest that, in Hungary, the emergence of a
housing market had proceeded quite far before the final collapse of state socialism.
In addition, private ownership in the realm of one of the most important areas of
consumption, housing, had also been already prevalent before the collapse. The
worlds of both state-owned and private housing institutions were thus extremely
stratified, exhibiting a great deal of inequality. We find with these data predating the
collapse of state socialism “private housing” to be a blanket category that hides
crucially important variation. Ownership of cooperative and condominium units is
clearly different from family houses: the former is widely preferred by the elites not
only to council housing but also to the family house. Variation according to settlement
16
type, because of its covariance with the frequency of each of the four types of
housing institutions, only accentuates this difference.
This is signalled by the shift of the educated and political elites to cooperatives and
condominia, creating a peculiar situation in council housing. This, lower-value
segment, gradually abandoned by the most successful actors of the state-socialist
game of status competition, serves as housing for something that could be described
as the state socialist urban lower and middle strata. The post-state-socialist
privatization of these council apartments represents a major one-time flow of state
subsidies--probably the last such subsidy injection executed by the (post-)state
socialist state--into the relatively advantaged subgroup of council dwellers. The
privatization of council housing--which was restricted to sitting tenants (Bodnár
1996b)--provided at least the appearance of an important opportunity for the more
mobile and more enterprising sections of these council dwellers to catch up with the
formerly state socialist elites by adjusting the ownership category of their housing unit
to the “private” category. Recognition and approval of these subsidies on part of the
middle strata may have contributed to the relative social peace of the transformation
despite the all-too-obvious losses of living standards and often of livelihood that have
accompanied the transformation.
Because of the privatization of such council-owned housing units, the content of the
“condominium” category has been expanded, mainly by way of differentiation
downward. After housing privatization, what remained as “council housing” has
become a more homogenous category (adjusting downward), similar to social
housing known from west European and north American urban housing.
These considerations are directly relevant to the institutional analysis of the ongoing
transformation of the European societies of the former state socialist bloc. Instead of
a single grand process--”market transition” taken to include also “privatization”--we
see at least four, conceptually and socially distinct, processes:
•
•
•
•
Marketization of housing under late state socialism involved the increasing
attachment of exchange value to, and widespread trade in, all forms of
housing provisions, including council-owned units. This undermined the
redistributive nature of council housing, and put a
serious cap on numerical extent of the “socialist” housing property form
already under state socialism so that most of the population lived in private
housing property by the time of the collapse of state socialism.
Private housing became, thus, well before the collapse of the state socialist
regime, extremely diversified as for the qualitative conditions it offered and the
attendant monetary value it represented. Thus,
the two government-driven housing privatization drives after the regime
change only extended the transformative work of the late state socialist period
into the most urban, “middle” segments of society where council housing still
had a significant presence, redefining the social meaning of council housing to
be ever more equivalent to “low” social position.
This suggests some important conceptual conclusions. First, large-scale housing
marketization and a turn toward private housing property took place well before the
collapse of the state socialist empire. Hence it would be a mistake to attribute all the
17
market process and all the private property seen today to the post-state-socialist
“transition.”
Second, we find the category of “private” ownership to be, at least in the housing
sphere, inadequate as a point of interest for studies of the transformation. The
blanket category of ‘private housing’ hides important institutional variation that should
be of acute interest for a comparative institutional sociology of housing. In sum, we
feel the market transition debate’s focus on a “post-communist transition to the
market” as well as on “privatization” are excessively simple and, hence, empirically
unsupported. The designation of the contemporary economy as a post-communist
market is imprecise because market forces were in place before the end of state
socialism. The private-public distinction on the other hand, while of course continuing
to be an important heuristic tool, turns out to be too blunt an instrument to depict the
complexities of the transformation, particularly with respect to housing. This is so
especially if spatial differences of settlement type are taken into account.
Third, taken together with the findings of Böröcz and Southworth (1995), our
evidence regarding the existence of relational resources suggests that informal social
networks are meaningful, widely used mechanisms of access to differential
advantages both of the “stock” and “flow” type in a late state socialist society. The
presence of marketization and privatization under state socialism already implies
that, in order to understand the historicity of the post-state-socialist transformation, it
is crucial to take into account the features of the late-state-socialist institutional
arrangements. The fact that our findings as well as Böröcz and Southworth’s data for
Hungary, along with work in China by John Logan and his colleagues, signal informal
social network assets at work during the erosion phase of state socialism suggests
that social network assets are a sociohistorical feature to be reckoned with when
addressing the capitalism emerging after state socialism. In the mercurial world of
eroding state socialism and the turmoil of the ensuing regime change, being betterconnected may turn out to be as important as being better-off.
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22
Judit Bodnár & József Böröcz: Housing Advantages for the Better-Connected? Institutional Segmentation,
Settlement Type and Social Network Effects in Hungary’s Late State-Socialist Housing Inequalities
TABLES 1-7
Tables: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Table 1. Logical Tree of Housing Institutions
Table 2. Distribution of the Population among Housing Institutions by Settlement
Type,* Hungary (row %)
council
coop
condo
family
house
Budapest
55.8
12.3
13.8
18.1
21.3
Towns
28.9
9.4
15.4
46.3
37.1
Villages
4.5
.4
.7
94.4
41.6
Total
24.4
6.3
8.9
60.3
100.
total
23
Table 3. Means and Standard Deviations of Variables Used in the Models
Variable
µ (%)
standard deviation
696.9
573.6
resides in council-owned unit (=1)
.22
.42
resides in co-op unit (-1)
.06
.24
resides in condominium unit (=1)
.15
.35
resides in family house (=1)
.58
.49
age (years)
45.4
17.1
female (=1)
.557
.5
Roma (=1)
.026
.16
number of children
1.59
1.36
two adults present (yes=1)
.72
.45
highest education: secondary (=1)
.23
.42
highest education: tertiary (=1)
.10
.30
CP member (=1)
.13
.33
manager (=1)
.09
.29
number of subordinates
.541
1.297
3
estimated value of housing unit (10 HUF)
0
(78.6)
(1) 1-5 persons
(8.2)
(2) 6-10 persons
(4.7)
(3) 11-20 persons
(3.4)
(4) 21-30 persons
(2.1)
(5) 31-50 persons
(1.3)
(6) 51-100 persons
(1.1)
(7) 100 +
(.7)
number of people in network with tertiary diploma
.93
1.75
ever awarded a lease decree (=1)
.07
.26
resides in Budapest
.21
.41
24
resides in other urban area
.37
.48
resides in rural area
.41
.49
income (HUF)
5707
5170
floor space (m2)
72.1
31.5
Table 4. Log Likelihood of Legally Residing in a Council-Owned Apartment in
1986, by Settlement Type (multinomial logit coefficients, comparison category:
family house)
Hungary
Budapest
towns
villages
age
-.005
.0008
.004
-.074
age2
.0000
-.0000
-.0001
.0004
female
.138
.238
.023
.097
Roma
.529*
.518
.438
-.601
# of children
.028
-.076
.111
.204*
together
-.325**
-.131
-.435*
.830*
education: secondary
.688***
.541*
.186
-.303
education: tertiary
.566**
.151
.047
.225
CP member
.253
.144
.192
.107
# of subordinates
-.042
-.0008
-.112*
.095
# of people with tertiary diploma in nwk
.257***
.100
.154**
.321**
ever awarded a lease decree
2.19*
1.57**
1.95**
2.55**
constant
-1.13
.672
-.586
-2.22
n
2889
615
1072
1202
?2(d.f.)
625.8(36)
89.23(36)
212.01(36)
105.78(36)
*: one-tailed p<.1; **: one-tailed p<.01; ***: one-tailed p<.001
25
Table 5. Log Likelihood of Legally Residing in a Co-Op Unit in 1986, by
Settlement Type (multinomial logit coefficients; comparison category: family
house)
Hungary
Budapest
towns
villages
age
.052
.122*
.012
.376
age2
-.0007*
-.001*
-.0005
-.004
female
-.027
.014
-.066
-.707
Roma
1.14**
1.21
.792
3.16*
# of children
-.022
.022
.039
-.229
together
-.268
-.210
-.009
-1.66
education: secondary
1.02***
.671*
.717**
-38.01
education: tertiary
1.18***
.574
.460
5.61**
CP member
.387*
.396
.192
.392
# of subordinates
-.016
-.079
.054
-.162
# of people with tertiary diploma in nwk
.180**
.070
.072
-.776
ever awarded a lease decree
1.39***
1.17*
.612
3.32**
constant
-3.51
-3.56
-1.66
-13.1
n
2889
615
1072
1202
?2(d.f.)
625.8(36)
89.23(36)
212.01(36)
105.78(36)
*: one-tailed p<.1; **: one-tailed p<.01; ***: one-tailed p<.001
26
Table 6. Log Likelihood of Legally Residing in a Condominium in 1986, by
Settlement Type (multinomial logit coefficients, comparison category: family
house)
Hungary
Budapest
towns
villages
age
-.018
-.046
.013
.016
age2
-.0001
.0005
-.0007
-.0006
female
-.154
.179
-.336*
.378
Roma
-.230
-.244
-.451
-37.7
# of children
-.066
-.221
.110
.057
together
.295
.241
.500*
-.206
education: secondary
1.38***
1.68**
.962**
1.75*
education: tertiary
1.25***
1.62**
.635*
.360
CP member
.379*
-.13
.485*
-38.6
# of subordinates
-.083
-.019
-.072
-36.8
# of people with tertiary diploma in nwk
.250***
.194**
.106
.487*
ever awarded a lease decree
1.23***
.703
.757*
2.87*
constant
-1.92
-.688
-1.30
-5.57
n
2889
615
1072
1202
?2(d.f.)
625.8(36)
89.23(36)
212.01(36)
105.78(36)
*: one-tailed p<.1; **: one-tailed p<.01; ***: one-tailed p<.001
27
Table 7. OLS Regression Coefficents for the10-based Logarithm of Estimated
Housing Value, Hungary, 1986 (metric coefficients)
Hungary
Budapest
towns
villages
age
.0007
-.006
.007
.004
age2
.0000
.0001
-.0001
-.0001
female
.073***
.015
.045*
.076**
Roma
-.059
-.112
-.023
-.131*
# of children
-.029***
.057
-.011
-.037***
together
.057
-.013
-.026*
.106***
education: secondary
.092***
.103*
.075**
.038
education: tertiary
.122***
.140*
.095*
.055
CP member
.004
.038
-.007
-.016
# of subordinates
.006
.007
.002
.013
# of people with tertiary diploma in network
.016**
-.003
.018*
.021*
resides in a council apartment
-.133***
-.369***
-.240***
-.114*
resides in a condo
.158***
-.005
.059*
.140
resides in a co-op unit
.025
-.049
.105*
-.009
log(10)floorspace
.813***
1.09***
.767***
.807***
ever awarded a lease decree
.085
.128*
.038
.009
log(10)income
.158
-.005
.026
.217***
constant
.526
1.05
1.11
.201
n
2203
429
847
927
R2adj
.3032
.4016
.3212
.3339
*: one-tailed p<.1; **: one-tailed p<.01; ***: one-tailed p<.001
28