Dynamics of democracy and autocracy

My main interest lies in the intersection of democracy and autocracy. I am focusing on the institutions and processes that drive undemocratic dynamics within democracies, democratic dynamics within autocracies, and the economic consequences of these dynamics. Within this broad topic, I have studied the impact of corruption on extremist party performance in Indonesia and Brazil, as well as a number of phenomena in Hungary. These include how poll workers' beliefs about election fraud affect their perception of election fraud, how social welfare spending fosters clientelism, how print newsletter circulation affects the election outcome in a biased media environment, and how far-right terrorism affected far-right party performance at the polls in the past.

Mobility and inequality

The stability of democracy (and, to some extent, any regime) depends on how effectively it delivers for its citizens. This is why I am interested in social mobility and economic inequality. Within these subfields, on the one hand, I am mostly interested in social mobility in the very long run, which, according to our work, seems to be very persistent across political regimes; on the other hand, I am interested in perceived economic inequality, which is tricky to measure, and has a far-reaching impact on one's political disposition.

Dusting the data

I am a firm believer in the use of historical data in the social sciences. I think we are sitting on a large, untapped reservoir of unique information that now becomes available through state-of-the-art machine learning and AI tools that make digitizing this data scalable and cost-efficient.  This is what I am mostly working on now: in 2023, I received a research grant within the framework of the Young Scholars' Excellence Program of the National Research and Development Office in Hungary. Using this grant, I am executing a research agenda that studies the impact of technological change on extremist political behavior in 19th and 20th-century Hungary, nation-building efforts under different regimes using micro data on surname Hungarianizations, and the micro-level impact of historical trauma on the spatial transmission of human capital across generations.