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.

DEMOS project leader Zsolt Boda interviews Andrew Arato on the impacts of populism on democratic life and its relationship with authoritarianism and well-fare state.

Miklós Sebők, senior research fellow of the Institute for Political Science, CSS HAS will serve as the new director of the Institute for Political Science. His mandate is for three years, starting July 1st, 2019.

DEMOS Leader Zsolt Boda Says "Populism Challenges Institutions of Liberal Democracies"

Populism is a complex term usually carrying a negative connotation, often associated with leaders who criticize the elite—be it political, academic or scientific—that their citizens view, and react to, with skepticism. Scholars have tried to define the term and label parties and politicians as such, but the H2020 Research and Innovation Action project DEMOS seeks to go beyond that, taking into account both the individual level, psychological roots of populist attitudes and describing the features and consequences of populist governance. In an interview for the Hungarian radio channel Civil Rádió on March 6, Zsolt Boda, the leader of DEMOS, spoke about the goals of the project. One of them is to cover populism through multiple manifestations across Europe and beyond, shedding light on its varieties, how populism relates to specific cultural contexts, and how different social actors react to the challenges of populism.

We have a new vacancy in the Institute! The Institute for Political Sciences is seeking to fill a full-time vacancy for a junior research fellow in the area of emotions and politics. Details are below.

Call for Populism and Political Efficacy topics

The Centre for Social Sciences of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences invites interested postdoctoral academics to develop a co-application for a Marie Skłodowska Curie Individual Fellowship (MSCA-IF-2019). The deadline for expressing your interest is May 20, 2019.

The latest ECE issue  - Volume 46 (2019): Issue 1 (Apr 2019) - has got published at Brill. The guest editor of this issue was Tibor Valuch. The set of articles included in the current issue presents a cross section of some of the newest research results of modern East-Central European labor history. The authors thematically investigate different sections and topics of ECE labor history. Even though they are using different methodological approaches, all of them share the common idea of a global perspective on labor issues when analyzing different countries of modern East-Central Europe.

Balázs Böcske and Csaba Molnár recently published a new article entitled "The radical right in government? – Jobbik’s pledges in Hungary’s legislation (2010–2014)" in East European Politics.