Rudolf Metz and Dániel Oross have recently published an article entilted „Strong Personalities’ Impact on Hungarian Party Politics: Viktor Orbán and Gábor Vona” in "Party Leaders in Eastern Europe”  edited by Sergiu Gherghina.

The study of political phenomena has attracted scholars from different disciplines (such as comparative politics, political economy, political sociology, and political communication), who approach intertwined questions from distinct perspectives. The resulting discourses, however, rarely engage with each other, while a comprehensive understanding of politics requires the joint application of diverse theoretical and methodological approaches, as well as syntheses of their results. This year’s instalment of our graduate conference, organized for the fifth time, aims to promote joint discourse and reflection by providing a forum for doctoral candidates and (post)graduate students engaged in political research.

Apache Spark is currently one of the most popular open-source cluster-computing frameworks. With its Machine Learning Library (MLlib) it supports the easy scaling of a range of feature extraction and machine learning tasks commonly employed in text mining. Furthermore, it works with both Python and R.

The Third International and Interdisciplinary Conference on the Quantitative and Computational Analysis of Textual Data will be held in Innsbruck, Austria, on 15-16 May 2020.

András Bíró-Nagy has recently published an article entilted „The Career Paths of Central European MEPs. Political Experience and Career Ambitions in the European Parliament” in Romanian Journal of Political Science.

Gergő Medve-Bálint and his co-author, Vera Šćepanović (Leiden University) has recently published an open access article on “EU funds, state capacity and the development of transnational industrial policies in Europe’s Eastern periphery”, in Review of International Political Economy.

Zsófia Papp recently published a new article entitled "Votes, money can buy. The conditional effect of EU Structural Funds on government MPs’ electoral performance" in  European Union Politics.

The 3rd Annual Conference of the POLTEXT international text mining community was held on September 13-15 at Waseda University in Tokyo. Organized by Kohei Watanabe, Lisa Lechner and Miklós Sebők (the principal investigator of the POLTEXT project at the Centre of Social Sciences, Budapest) the event featured tutorials and presentations by three other researchers of CSS: Márton Bene, Zoltán Kacsuk and Martina Szabó. For more information see poltextconference.org and poltext.tk.mta.hu.