Institutional Constraints as Primary Sources of Sustaining Social Exclusion - Through a special focus of Acemoglu

Absztrakt (kivonat)

In my paper I focus on the special circumstances that make social exclusion a vicious circle. Using the model of Acemoglu et al. for describing the role of institutional processes in underdevelopment I suppose that institutions rather than cultural and geographical reasons are primarily responsible for the social exclusion of the Roma population in Hungary. In order to test my hypothesis I will firstly define the special circumstances, how institutional factors defined by Acemoglu can be interpreted in the exclusion of Roma. At first I will provide a detailed explanation on the causes that reinforce the exclusion of Roma from the political institutions. Than I identify the harmful mechanisms in the distribution of resources that are responsible for sustaining this exclusion. In the following part I find that cultural explanations of social exclusion are appearing only indirectly among the causes of the exclusion of Roma, as an endogenous reason. Although geographical reasons have a greater significance, I could not exclude the effect of Roma people's higher concentration in poorer areas when using geographical differences as explanation for social exclusion. Therefore I conclude that the ineffective representation in political institutions and institutionalized bad “distribution of resources” in primarily education and therefore in labor market are to be blamed in the first place for the multi dimensional permanent phenomenon of exclusion of the Roma in Hungary.