CEU Political Science Department

CEU Political Science Department is pleased to announce that Assistant Professor Björn Bremer has been named the recipient of the 2026 Carolina de Miguel Moyer Young Scholar Award, presented annually by the Council for European Studies to an emerging scholar who has made the most significant contribution to the interdisciplinary study of Europe.

The award acknowledges Professor Bremer's outstanding contribution to our understanding of welfare and fiscal politics in the EU since the Great Recession. His 2023 monograph Austerity from the Left (Oxford University Press) and more than twenty peer-reviewed articles have established him as a leading voice in the field. A co-authored book with Lucio Baccaro on the politics of Eurozone stagnation is under contract with Princeton University Press.

At Central European University, Professor Bremer teaches courses on macroeconomic policy, inequality, and the green transition.

We congratulate Professor Bremer on this well-deserved honour.

🎉 Celebrating Our Outstanding Award Recipients!

As we wrap up another Academic Year, we are proud to announce the recipients of this year's Departmental Awards. Congratulations to all!

🏆 Best Teaching Assistant
Sebastian Engler — thank you for your dedication to the students!

📜 Outstanding Thesis Award

1-Year MA
🔹 Thomas Paolino, supervised by Matthijs Bogaards — "Judicial Legitimacy When Courts Sanction Politicians: Survey Evidence from the Marine Le Pen Prosecution in France"
🔹 Seb Elmes, supervides by Anca Gheaus — "No Man is an AI-sland: Can Liberal States Justify Governing the Social Impacts of Human-AI Relationships?"

2-Year MA
🔹 Sofija Kirsanov, supervised by Daniel Bochsler — "Containing Multitudes: How Identity Hierarchies Condition Party Support"

🌟 Outstanding Departmental Service
🔹Erwan Leroy & Lucia Tomcanyiova — in recognition of their exceptional contributions to the life and community of the Department of Political Science.

Thank you to everyone who made this year so special👏

Last chance to register for the MethodsNET Summer School!

The countdown is officially on. In exactly 10 days, the Methods NET Summer School with CEU Political Science Department kicks off its pre-week online sessions, followed by our intensive in-person tracks in Vienna.

Whether you need to master advanced statistical approaches, deep-dive into case-based designs, or refine your qualitative fieldwork techniques, our world-class instructors are ready to help elevate your research.

Don't let your methodological training stall until next year. Access the full course list one last time and secure your participant slot before registration closes completely: https://methodsnet.org/course-list/

CEU Political Science faculty member Gabor Simonovits has published a new article in Nature Human Behaviour, co-authored with Bence Hamrak. The study finds that public support for drug regulation in the US is driven by status quo bias rather than assessments of harm — with significant implications for evidence-based policy reform. 🔗 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-026-02471-y

We are pleased to share two new publications by CEU Assistant Professor Björn Bremer.
The first, published in Climate Policy, examines whether framing wealth taxation around carbon inequality can build public support for green investment in Germany: https://doi.org/10.1080/14693062.2026.2661351
The second, in Comparative Political Studies, revisits public support for fiscal consolidation in Great Britain — finding that voters' appetite for austerity is considerably weaker than policymakers often assume: https://doi.org/10.1177/00104140261431821

In some EU countries, over 50% of young workers are employed on temporary contracts. New research by CEU Professor Anil Duman tracks what this means for workers' longer-term careers, drawing on two decades of longitudinal data across EU member states. Her findings show that temporary employment can serve as a route into stable work — but its effects vary significantly by age, gender, education, and national labour market context.

Full paper: https://www.eurofound.europa.eu/en/publications/all/examining-temporary-employment-in-eu-member-states-a-longitudinal-perspective

📚 Two new publications from CEU Political Science!

Professor Anca Gheaus has published an entry on "Feminism" in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics — proposing a bold, ecumenical definition of feminism as the project of abolishing unjustified gender norms, one that bridges the divide between trans-inclusive and gender-critical feminists.
🔗 https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/62239/chapter-abstract/560377365

And in April, Professor Judit Sandor contributed the chapter "Secrets and Lies: Moral Confusion and Banning All Forms of Surrogacy in Hungary" to Surrogacy Today: A European Legal Overview (Trivent Publishing) — examining Hungary's surrogacy ban within broader European debates on human dignity and the right to found a family.
🔗 https://trivent-publishing.eu/home/226-429-surrogacy-today-a-european-legal-overview.html

This year, Central European University turns 35. 🎂

These photos take us back to where it all began — a young university in Budapest, a department devoted to teaching and learning in a city full of energy and change. Seminars that never ended, books stacked to the ceiling, even a New York field trip or two.

A lot has happened since then. Careers built, books written, students taught. And through it all, this community stayed close.
Thirty-five years later, CEU is in Vienna — and this Friday, we are all getting back together.

To everyone joining us for the alumni reunion: we cannot wait to see you. ❤️

🗳️ The April 12, 2026 Hungarian parliamentary election, widely regarded as a watershed moment for European democracy, has prompted extensive scholarly debate. We are proud that several members of our Department of Political Science have contributed their expertise to the public discourse, both before and after the vote.

Zsolt Enyedi has been among the most prominent voices in international media. He discussed the election's implications on the Democracy in Question? podcast, participated in a panel at The George Washington University / FPRI, published an explainer on The Conversation UK on Peter Magyar's rise, and contributed analytical pieces to the CIVICA and The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) EuroPP blogs examining what Tisza's victory means for the future of illiberalism in Europe.

Andras Bozoki co-authored a major analytical essay on Democracy Seminar, arguing that TISZA's electoral breakthrough represents an "electoral revolution", a paradigm case in which the very instruments designed to sustain an electoral autocratic regime were turned against it.

Daniel Bochsler offered his perspective in the Swiss public sphere, speaking to NAU.ch on how Magyar's victory may weaken Putin's regional influence, and appearing on RSI's (Swiss public broadcaster) programme Modem in a segment titled "Addio Orbán."

Matthijs Bogaards published a commentary for the Montesquieu Instituut asking a pointed question: Can Péter Magyar save Hungarian democracy? His answer is sobering - Hungary, he argues, is no longer a democracy in the classical sense, having become one of the "dictatorships with elections" that have proliferated since the post-Cold War democratization wave.

Anil Duman offered a critical perspective in the Turkish press (Birgün), cautioning that Magyar's claim to "regime change" remains quite limited, and that while Orbán's defeat demonstrates the fragility of such systems, it cannot yet be read as a definitive global retreat of the populist wave.

Together, these contributions reflect our department's commitment to rigorous, engaged scholarship on democracy, autocracy, and electoral politics, in Hungary and beyond.

Read more: https://lnkd.in/dYphgukz

📌 New publication from CEU Political Science!

Professor Anil Duman has written a new piece for CIVICA’s Experts in the Spotlight series, examining how the 2026 energy crisis is reshaping Europe’s green transition — and what it means for the future of climate policy across the continent.

The article is part of her work on the CIVICA-funded project Brown to Green: The Political Economy of Risks, Voting, and Compensation Policies.

Read it on the CIVICA website → https://www.civica.eu/news-events/news-blog/detail/geopolitics-and-europes-green-transition-how-the-2026-energy-crisis-is-shaping-climate-policy-energy-security-and-political-stability