The ELTE Centre for Social Sciences is a research institution where 200 Hungarian and international researchers engage in exploratory and innovative national and international research projects in the Social Sciences. Founded by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the Centre’s charter established its freedom to research without political influence. As of 1 August, 2025, the Centre is part of Eötvös Loránd University but remained an independent legal body. Comprising four institutes – Political Science, Minority Studies, Legal Studies, Sociology and other research units – the Centre has greatly contributed to understanding and addressing far-reaching societal issues that pertain to Hungarian and European societies.
The institutes, research groups, research centres and other units of CSS.
The Centre’s research activities focus on sociology, political science, computational social science, network science, minority studies, and law. Researchers take an interdisciplinary approach in their scientific work. The Centre’s main goals are to extend the quality of Hungarian research to Europe and beyond, to take a prominent regional lead in social science research, and to serve as a point of scientific reference in Hungary.
Publishing six journals – two of them ranked by SCOPUS –, the Centre’s ambition has also been to expand its international publication portfolio in highly ranked international journals and publishing companies. Between 2018 and 2024, the number of papers written by our researchers published in journals ranked Q1 and D1 quadrupled. A state-of-the-art research performance evaluating system has been used since 2013 with a focus on internal publications.
The Centre manages over a hundred local and international research projects. Our researchers have actively engaged in international projects with the EU’s Horizon Europe research funding scheme, and the Centre has worked on managing several of these projects. Project consortia coordinated by the Centre have been DEMOS and MORES. Among running Horizon Europe projects are SoGreen, INTERFACED, TWIN4DEM, Infra4NextGen, PLEDGE. In the past, the Centre hosted an ERC Consolidator Grant, EVILTONGUE. The Centre participated in H2020 projects as a Work Package leader (such as RURALIZATION, QUINNE, and COURAGE) and took part in a variety of FP7 projects (such as MIME, MOPACT, FAMILIES & SOCIETIES, FIDUCIA, and PROSUITE), COST actions, and Visegrad grants. The Centre is part of the European Social Survey (ESS), a Europe-wide research infrastructure. An emerging field in the social sciences, Artificial Intelligence is studied by our poltextLAB research group.
The Centre and its researchers provide policy expertise in various fields, e.g. for the Curia of Hungary, ministries, children's rights.
A professional research administration team constantly sharpens its expertise in proposal writing, research communication and impact, and management of international grants. Besides receiving domestic and international training, the members of the Centre’s administration play active roles in international research management networks, such as EARMA and BESTPRAC. Besides, the Centre operates an open-access repository for research data and provides consultations for its researchers on GDPR and data management.