Manuela Caiani is associate professor in political science at the Scuola Normale Superiore, affiliated scholar at the Cosmos Center for Social Movement Studies (SNS) and associated faculty at the Institute for Advanced Studies (IHS) in Vienna. She received her national Italian Abilitazione for full professorship in political science and in political sociology in 2017. Her research focuses on social movements and Europeanization, far-right politics, extremism online, right-wing and left-wing populism, movement-parties, and qualitative methods of social research. Since 2019, she is convenor of the Standing Group ‘Political Participation and Social Movements’ of the Italian Association for Political Science (SISP) and, since 2021, co-director of the International Observatory on Social Cohesion and Inclusion-OCIS. She has directed and collaborated in various international projects (Horizon 2021; Volskwagen Stiftung; Europe for Citizens Program; FP4, FP5, FP7; PRIN; Marie Curie; Research Grant Jubilaumsfonds, ONB; Doctoral TRA Fellowship, START Center, 2009, University of Maryland). She has published in, among others, the following journals: Social Movement Studies, European Journal of Political Research, Mobilization, Acta Politica, West European Politics, Government and Opposition, European Union Politics, South European Society and Politics, and the Italian Political Science Review, as well as for the following publishers: Oxford University Press, Ashgate, Palgrave, and Routledge.
Zsolt Enyedi studied comparative social sciences, history, sociology and political science in Budapest and Amsterdam. The focus of his research interests is on party politics, comparative government, church and state relations, and political psychology (especially authoritarianism, prejudices, and political tolerance). His articles have appeared in journals such as Political Psychology, European Journal of Political Research, Political Studies, West European Politics, Party Politics, Political Studies, Europe-Asia Studies, Problems of Post-Communism, Journal of Ideologies, and European Review. Zsolt Enyedi was the 2003 recipient of the Rudolf Wildenmann Prize and the 2004 winner of the Bibó Award. He was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center (Washington DC), Kellogg Institute (Notre Dame University), the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies (Wassenaar), the European University Institute (Florence), the Center for Transatlantic Relations, Johns Hopkins University, Department of Politics and International Relations and Pembroke College, University of Oxford. His most recent book, Party System Closure, co-authored with Fernando Casal Bertoa, was published by Oxford University Press in 2021.
Petra Guasti is an associate professor of democratic theory at the Charles University in Prague and a senior research fellow at the Institute of Sociology, Czech Academy of Sciences. Between 2016 and 2021, Petra served as a senior researcher, interim professor, and adjunct lecturer at the Goethe University Frankfurt. In April 2021, she completed her habilitation at the Goethe University Frankfurt. Petra received her doctoral degree in political science from the University of Bremen. She also earned a doctoral degree in political sociology from Charles University in Prague. In March 2019, she completed an eight-month Visiting Democracy Fellowship at Harvard University’s Ash Centre for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. Her research focuses on reconfiguring the political landscape and revolves around representation, democratization, and populism. Since 2003 and 2009, respectively, she serves as an expert for the Bertelsmann Foundation’s Bertelsmann Transformation Index and Sustainable Governance Indicators (together with Zdenka Mansfeldova) and, since 2018, as a V-Dem country expert. In 2020, she was appointed to the expert board of the Nation in Transit (Freedom House). Since March 2021, she regularly lectures US diplomats at the Foreign Service Institute of the US State Department on the interaction between democracy and the pandemic in Central and Eastern Europe. Between 2022 and 2025, she is a co-principal investigator of SYRI (National Institute for Research on the Socio-Economic Impact of Diseases and Systemic Risks), supported by the Czech National Recovery Plan. In SYRI, she also leads a PA5 team working on polarization and populism.
Daniel Hegedüs is senior fellow and senior program officer at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. His areas of research include democratic and rule of law backsliding in the European Union, populism, and the European and foreign affairs of the Visegrad countries. He has studied political science, history, and European law at the Eötvös Loránd University Budapest and the Humboldt University in Berlin. Before joining GMF as a fellow in 2019, he worked in different positions at the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP), the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) and Freedom House, and also taught in the Institute for Eastern-European Studies at the Free University Berlin, at the Humboldt University in Berlin, and the Eötvös Loránd University Budapest. He is author of more than 50 academic and policy papers, and he frequently writes and speaks in international media.
Sylvia Kritzinger is professor of methods in the social sciences at the Department of Government of the University of Vienna. She obtained her PhD in political science at the University of Vienna and was then lecturer at Trinity College Dublin and assistant professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies (IHS-Vienna). She is one of the principal investigators of the Austrian National Election Study (AUTNES) and the Austrian Corona Panel Project (ACPP). She acts as head of the Department of Government, deputy director of the Vienna Centre for Electoral Research (VieCER), the research network Interdisciplinary Value Research, and runs the digitalization project Digitize! Computational Social Science in the Digital and Social Transformation. She serves as deputy scientific director of the Austrian Social Science Data Archive and is a member of the Methods Advisory Board of the European Research Infrastructure European Social Survey. She is member of the Editorial Boards of West European Politics, European Union Politics, and Italian Journal of Electoral Studies. Her research focuses on political behavior and electoral research, democratic representation and political participation, and survey research. She has published inter alia in Comparative Political Studies, Political Communication, Electoral Studies, Journal of European Public Policy, British Journal of Political Science, West European Politics, and European Journal of Political Research.
Radoslaw Markowski is a professor in social sciences. He specializes in comparative political science and political sociology. He researches political behavior, party systems, and democracy. He heads the Center for the Study of Democracy at SWPS University, is the principal investigator of the Polish National Election Study (PGSW) and works with the Polish Academy of Sciences. He is a recurring visiting professor at the Central European University. Formerly, he was visiting professor at the Duke University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the Rutgers University. Radoslaw has been a member of editorial boards of numerous political science journals, including the European Journal of Political Research, Political Studies, European Union Politics, Populism, Journal of Elections, and Public Opinion and Parties. The co-authored book, Post-Communist Party Systems, published by Cambridge University Press is his main publication. He has served as an expert for many international institutions, like the Council of Europe, and projects, among them the SGI Bertelsmann project, and the Varieties of Democracy.
Jan Rovny is an associate professor at the Centre d’études européennes and the Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Evaluation of Public Policies at Sciences Po, Paris. His research focuses on political competition in Europe with the aim of uncovering the political conflict lines in different countries. He explores the issues that political parties contest across the continent, the strategies that different parties follow, and the preferences and voting patterns of voters. He is one of the principal investigators of the Chapel Hill Expert Survey on party positioning. He teaches courses in comparative politics and quantitative methodology, and advise students studying parties, electoral behavior, or ethnic politics in Europe, and acts as a co-director of graduate studies in comparative politics, as well as the academic advisor to the Sciences Po Summer School. He is an associate editor of East European Politics and Societies: and Cultures.
Stephen Whitefield is a fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford and professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford. After completing his doctorate in 1991 on Soviet political and economic institutions (published as Industrial Power and the Soviet State by Oxford University Press in 1993—Ed A. Hewett Prizewinner), he has spent the last 30 years studying post-communist politics and society via mass surveys conducted repeatedly in 13 post-communist countries. On the way, he became interested in the character of post-communist and now West European political parties, which he is also investigating (with Robert Rohrschneider at Kansas University) via expert surveys of their stances. This work led, among many other publications, to a 2012 Oxford University Press book, The Strain of Representation. How Political Parties in Western and Eastern Europe Represent Diverse Voters. His interest in programmatic stances of parties and voters – and the degree to which they are congruent – has led on to a study of how parties differ in their emotional appeals to voters.
