How Neo-Calvinist Authority Grammar Legitimates Illiberal Education Governance in Hungary

This dataset accompanies an article submitted to Politics and Religion (Cambridge University Press). It contains the complete coded corpus and analytical codebooks for a Discourse-Historical Analysis (DHA) tracing the recontextualisation of Neo-Calvinist authority grammar from doctrinal theology into Hungarian education governance.The dataset is organised around a four-node recontextualisation chain: (1) Abraham Kuyper's Lectures on Calvinism (1898), coded for 13 discourse-analytical categories; (2) Reformed pedagogical field documents — the Baár-Madas Reformed Gymnasium Pedagogical Program (2024), the Hungarian Reformed Church Education Act (1995, as amended 2023), and Bishop Zoltán Balog's 2023 National Reformed School Opening address; (3) Viktor Orbán's education-adjacent and programmatic speeches (2014–2020), including the Băile Tușnad keynotes; and (4) national education governance instruments used for contextual triangulation.Each codebook records macro-arguments (MA) and sub-arguments (SA) with full DHA coding: topos label, warrant structure, nomination (we/they positioning), predication, perspectivisation, intensification, mitigation, and intertextual/recontextualisation links. Topos registers summarise the argumentative patterns per text. A corpus inventory spreadsheet maps each text to its codebook and records metadata (author, date, genre, language, number of coded segments, and role in the chain).Coding was conducted on original-language texts (Hungarian and English) by a single analyst following the DHA framework of Reisigl and Wodak (2016). Analytical reliability was pursued through iterative coding across two rounds, cross-genre triangulation across all three Node 2 texts, and a full audit trail preserved in the codebooks.Reuse. Researchers may use these materials to (a) replicate or contest the article's findings; (b) extend the recontextualisation analysis to additional nodes (e.g., textbook content, teacher training curricula); (c) conduct comparative studies of religious-political legitimation grammars in other national contexts; or (d) apply alternative coding frameworks (e.g., Legitimation Code Theory, argumentation theory) to the same corpus. All Orbán speeches are public-domain government texts (kormany.hu). Kuyper's Lectures are in the public domain.