The Centre for Social Sciences POLECON

Gergő Medve-Bálint is a Senior Research Fellow and Head of Department of Government and Public Policy. He holds a PhD in Political Science from Central European University. His research rests at the intersection of comparative and international political economy: he studies the effects of European integration on Central and Eastern Europe, most notably the impact of the EU’s industrial and cohesion policies with a particular emphasis on the politics of foreign direct investment, regional inequality and regional development. His works have been published in JCMS, Studies in Comparative International Development and Review of International Political Economy. He is the principal investigator of the projects on Regional developmental capacities in the EU's peripheries and on Transnationalized developmental regimes in Eastern Europe.

Tamás Barczikay is an Assistant Research Fellow at the Department of Government and Public Policy and a PhD candidate at Corvinus University of Budapest. He is a graduate of the Macroeconomics, Finance and Econometrics supplementary program at the Pallas Athéné Domus Scientiae Foundation of the Central Bank of Hungary. His research interests focus on the implementation of time series models in political science. More specifically, he is interested in modelling the correspondence between forced displacement and populist party support. His recent work was published in International Migration, the official journal of the United Nations Migration Agency.

Attila Bartha, PhD in Economics, is a Research Fellow at the Department of Government and Public Policy and an Associate Professor at the Institute for Economic and Public Policy, Corvinus University of Budapest. His main areas of research are comparative public policy, welfare policy and political economy. In 2012-2015 he was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Center for Policy Studies, Central European University. In 2014 he received the ‘Excellent Teacher Prize’ from the Széchenyi István College for Advanced Studies. Having an extensive experience as principal investigator, currently, he serves as work package leader in the H2020 project on Democratic Efficacy and the Varieties of Populism in Europe (DEMOS). He is also the founding editor of the journal Intersections. East European Journal of Society and Politics.

András Bíró-Nagy is a Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Government and Public Policy. He has been involved in several academic projects investigating the effects of European integration on Hungarian politics and public policies. In particular, he has studied the Europeanization of law-making in Hungary (within the framework of an MTA Bolyai Scholarship), by investigating the European origin of all laws adopted since Hungary’s European accession. He has also published a book on how the Hungarian political elite integrated into European institutions and how this has affected policy-making both at the EU level and in domestic politics. In 2013-14 he worked at the European Commission where he gained unique insights into the process of how EU-level policies are proposed, debated and adopted.

György Hajnal is Professor and Director of the Institute of Economic and Public Policy at Corvinus University of Budapest and Tenured Research Chair at the Centre for Social Sciences. Prior to his current positions he has worked for 15 years as a Senior Researcher, later Head of Department, at the Hungarian Institute of Public Administration and its successor. Beside his full-time academic positions he is extensively involved in international research cooperation projects in topics related to comparative public management reforms, and he has served as a consultant to various international academic, governmental and business organizations.

Marianna Kopasz is a Research Fellow at the Department of Government and Public Policy. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the Corvinus University of Budapest. Her main research interests include poverty, wellbeing for vulnerable populations, social policy, and educational policy. She has been doing research in the field of child welfare and protection for more than a decade. In the past years, she has participated in several research projects, funded by the EU, including GINI (2010-2013), ImPRovE (2012-2015), InGRID (2013-2016), and InGRID-2 (2017-2021). Her works have been published in Research Papers in Education, Corvinus Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, several Hungarian-language journals, and in edited volumes.

Ákos Máté is Research Fellow at the Department of Government and Public Policy. He earned his PhD in Political Science from Central European University. In his dissertation on Debt and Deficit in the Age of Fiscal Councils, he compared the role and effect of fiscal councils in Belgium and Slovakia on the economic policies and budgetary discipline of the central governments. His research focuses on the political economy of fiscal institutions in the European Union. He is interested in network analysis, quantitative text analysis and data visualization. 

Zsanett Pokornyi is a Junior Research Fellow at the Department of Government and Public Policy and a PhD candidate at Eötvös Loránd University. In her dissertation she investigates the role of government legitimacy in shaping tax compliance and tax morale in Hungary. Her research interests include taxation, tax compliance and tax morale, collective action and government strategies, executive agendas and parliamentary work. She has been awarded two scholarships (in 2018 and in 2019) in the National Excellence Programme (ÚNKP) for her comparative research on Polish and Hungarian taxpaying motivations. 

Miklós Sebők is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Social Sciences (CSS) and a Director of the Institute for Political Science, CSS in Budapest. He received his M.A. degrees from the University of Virginia and Corvinus University, and earned his Ph.D. in Political Science from ELTE University in Budapest. He currently serves as the Research Director of the Hungarian Comparative Agendas Project. His research interests include political economy, public policy and quantitative text analysis. He has published articles in, inter alia, the European Journal of Political Research, the European Political Science Review, the Journal of Budgeting, the Journal of Legislative Studies, the Japanese Journal of Political Science. His book chapters appeared with Oxford University Press and Palgrave.

David M. Wineroither works as a Senior Research Fellow in the Institute for Political Science at the Center for Social Sciences and the Department of Governance and Public Policy at National University for Public Service, Budapest. He obtained his PhD from the University of Innsbruck where he was Assistant Professor for Comparative Politics. Previous affiliations include the University of Alberta (Visiting Professor) and CEU Budapest (Visiting Researcher). Specialized in party competition and political leadership, David is a member of H2020-sponsored DEMOS project on democratic effects of varieties of populism across Europe. His latest book is ‘Democracy in Austria’ (co-edited with Guenter Bischof; UNO press and iup 2019).