I am a Postdoctoral Fellow in Budapest, Hungary. Together with my co-author, we are now pursuing an academic project that develops a novel measure of the degree of affective elite polarization, that is, likes towards in-groups and dislikes towards out-groups. The project uses the data from the parliamentary speeches. ChatGPT 4 autonomously identifies instances where politicians criticize each other and then measures their attitude toward their counterparts. It does this not merely based on words but on context and articulates in human language the reasons for its interpretations. We use the existing corpus of parliamentary speeches and aim to create an EU-wide dataset of affective polarization occurring in the last two decades. This project can be potentially extended into a worldwide index of affective polarization and publicity regarding this sphere (e.g. creating a website with visualization tools).

I hold a PhD in Political Science from the European University Institute. My research interests include autocratic politics and various types of regime change: from transitions within autocratic regimes to democratisations to democratic backslides. I taught classes in European University at Saint Petersburg, HHU Dusseldorf, and TU Darmstadt.

In my previous research, I am seeking to tease out the preconditions for democratic backslides. In my PhD thesis, I analyzed preconditions for pacted transitions from authoritarian rule and showed different pathways that allow for a successful transition depending on who represents the opposition during negotiations.

Download my resumé.