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, organised 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

This weekend at APSA, Bryan Jones accepted the Lijphart/Przeworski/Verba award for best dataset on behalf of Comparative Agendas Project for its important contribution to comparative politics. The Hungarian CAP team was represented by its research director, Miklós Sebők

Populism has been widely studied by academia. Yet, studies haven’t ascertained how citizens react to populism, nor how populism affects them. Check out interview with European Citizen Action Service (ECAS) executive director Assya Kavrakova and find out how DEMOS's action research fills that gap and how it will try to detect populist fakenews.

UKIP employed a fusion-strategy, which merged their traditional critique of Europe with a critique of immigration, as a way of overcoming the low electoral salience of the EU

Populism is not always bad, but a populist political message can divide societies between “us” and “them”, explains Jennifer McCoy, a distinguished professor of political science at Georgia State University and a senior core fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study at Central European University. In a new episode of DEMOS interviews on YouTube, McCoy discusses the main features and negative consequences of populism for democracy, like a deep political polarization, and how society can detect and react to them.

The Institute for Political Science of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences intends to honour the best English or Hungarian presentation at Conference for Doctoral Students of Political Science organized by Institute for Political Science CUB.

Political scientist David M. Wineroither, DEMOS researcher at the Centre for Social Sciences of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, wrote an op-ed for the Austrian national daily Der Standard. In his piece, Wineroither summarizes the structural inability for collective leadership on behalf of British Tory Brexiteers—a feature to characterize both the political ascendancy of Boris Johnson and populists in the majority of countries on the continent

DEMOS interviews Levente Littvay, Professor of Political Science, Central European University (CEU) and member of the Team Populism on collaboration between academics and the Guardian, which has published a series of evidence-based articles on populism. Littvay also spoke about his research on populism, populist discourse, and the CEU Comparative Populism Project

Are all political discourses evoking the role of the people in democracies necessarily populists? Check out DEMOS Budapest-based researcher Gabriella Szabó's blog post on the topic and on populist communication techniques for more.

Jose Maria Castellà, professor at the University of Barcelona and leader of the Spanish team in DEMOS, said that the use and abuse of referenda on any subject in contemporary democracies are typical of populist parties. “These parties tend to claim that institutions of representative democracy are not representing the so called true people, and present their political action as a direct enactment of people’s will,” Castella, also a member of the Venice Commission of the Council of Europe, told “Expansión”, Spain’s leading business newspaper. The interview, on the rise and impacts of populist politics in Europe, came out on the eve of Spain’s elections.