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.

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.

Central European Societies on the Map of Europe
A thematic issue dedicated to the European Social Survey’s Central European data

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.

Socio.hu Social Science Review
Extended deadline for submitting abstracts: 25 March, 2019