In democratic political systems, the main actors of representative democracy are party leaders, elected parliamentarians, and cabinet members. In addition to these, there are other ways of decision-making in a democratic political system such as participatory and deliberative democracy. These involve citizens and non-governmental organizations that aim to improve the social acceptance and effectiveness of political decisions. Research on democratic innovations focuses on successful practices and methods aimed at changing democratic governance and political structures to improve them. Such innovations range from direct democracy (e.g. referendums, agenda initiatives, recall) to deliberative practices (e.g. deliberative polling, consultative mini-publics, participatory budgeting etc.) in offline and online settings.

POLTEXT’s proposal for ParlaMint’s ‘Call for New Languages’ has been successful and POLTEXT will now have the opportunity to contribute parliamentary corpora to ParlaMint’s (CLARIN) collection.

Miklós Sebők and Zoltán Kacsuk have published an article entitled ’The Multiclass Classification of Newspaper Articles with Machine Learning: The Hybrid Binary Snowball Approach’ in Political Analysis.

Publication: Miklós Sebők and Sándor Kozák have published a new article entitled ‘From State Capture to “Pariah” Status? The Preference Attainment of the Hungarian Banking Association (2006–14)’ in Business and Politics.

Attila Bartha and Violetta Zentai have just published a new article entitled "Long-Term Care and Gender Equality: Fuzzy-Set Ideal Types of Care Regimes in Europe" in Social Inclusion.

Xénia Farkas and Márton Bene have recently published an article entitled "Images, Politicians, and Social Media: Patterns and Effects of Politicians’ Image-Based Political Communication Strategies on Social Media" in the International Journal of Press/Politics.

Gergő Medve-Bálint and his colleagues have recently published an article entitled "North and South, East and West: Is It Possible to Bridge the Gap?" in Governance and Politics in the Post-Crisis European Union edited by Coman, Ramona, Amandine Crespy, és Vivien Ann Schmidt (Cambridge University Press)

Pál Susánszky and his colleagues have recently published an article entitled  "Radical-Right Political Activism on the Web and the Challenge for European Democracy: A Perspective from Eastern and Central Europe" in Democracy and Fake News Information Manipulation and PostTruth Politics edited by Serena Giusti and Elisa Piras (Routledge).

Dániel Mikecz has recently published an article entitled  "Claims-making and Morality: The Case of Hungarian Solidarity Movements" in the Czech Journal of Political Science.

Dániel Mikecz has recently published an article entitled  "Civil society as a counterbalance to democratic backlash? The civil society master frame and discursive opportunities of politically active civil organizations in Hungary" in the Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe.