According to Maier's (2001) hypothesis, the democratization process in post-socialist countries would lead to the increased importance of stakeholder and citizen participation in urban planning. Increasing circles of stakeholders would be able to join and become empowered. The objective of the present paper is to revisit Maier's hypothesis in the Hungarian context. We attempt to shed light on the main factors that shape the framework conditions of participation in urban planning; we ask if the three decades of transition can be described as an approximation to the Western standards in urban planning, as Maier suggested.
We conducted 49 semi-structured interviews in three Hungarian middle-sized cities with various stakeholders of urban planning. We carried out qualitative content analysis based on inductive coding in order to identify the underlying factors, which shape the framework conditions of participation. We managed to identify six factors. They have mostly accumulated since the fall of the socialist era, the post-socialist legacy may only have indirect effects on them. These six factors add up to a halt in the democratization of planning and the serious limits to consensus building. We argue that these two processes diverted Hungary from the path Maier envisioned, and make the Hungarian context for participation and participatory techniques fundamentally different from the Western-European contexts.

Keywords: participation, urban planning, post-socialist, Maier's hypothesis, Hungary