Biography

Bence Hamrak is a Research Fellow at the Florence School of Transnational Governance (STG) of the European University Institute (EUI). He holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Politics from the Central European University (CEU). Previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Government of the University of Vienna.

Bence’s research asks why democratic accountability, representation, and resilience sometimes holds or collapses. In these questions, he focuses on political actors, and approaches their role in upholding or undermining these institutions and norms through theories of group psychology, group behavior, and informational biases. His earlier work centered on citizens. At STG, he works within the LIBRAD project, applying the social group perspective now to explain when and why civil servants resist democratic backsliding and illiberal state transformation. He specializes in survey and experimental methods.

His works appeared in journals such as the Nature Human Behaviour, the Journal of Politics, or the British Journal of Political Science.

Research projects, clusters and working groups

• Democratic Administration under Illiberal Rule: Impact, Resistance, Resilience

Fields of expertise