Reputational Networks in a Divided Elite

Since 2010, the Hungarian cultural field has experienced significant changes. The populist/illiberal governmental elite has been gaining increased influence and power over other elite groups, such as the economic and cultural elite. In the field of culture the incumbent political elite has aspired to eliminate old cultural structures in order to redistribute cultural positions and resources. The symbolic dimension of this fight is over cultural reputation, which is in the focus of our inquiry. Hungarian cultural elite is deeply polarised. While the positional elite (i.e. leaders of public cultural institutions) is generally supportive of the government; the reputational elite (i.e. the most acknowledged artists and intellectuals) tend to be more critical. Our survey was carried out among the cultural elite (N=458). It combined positional and reputational elite identification, which allows us to study the production and distribution of cultural reputation in the elite. According to the votes of our positional elite respondents, we compiled the list of the most prominent cultural actors, and included them in our sample. Based on this survey data, we created two kinds of network matrixes: 1. the matrix of cultural reputation to identify the most renowned actors in the cultural elite (the centrum of the network) 2. we also created the matrix of personal acquaintances inside the reputational matrix (whether respondents know personally the actors they vote to). We used exponential random graph models (ERGMs) to detect how political polarisation (controlling for other relevant variables such as gender, age, cultural genre, education and public intellectual activity) affects the reputational and personal network of elite members. Our results show that there are political structural holes (Burt 2004, Stark and Vedres 2012) in the cultural reputational network of the Hungarian elite. In the meantime, the central network positions of the reputational elite criticising the incumbent political elite refers to the stability of the structure of the cultural elite that cannot easily be changed, despite of the governmental attempts for controlling the cultural field.