Biography

Elena Cossu is a political scientist who applies natural language processing, machine learning, and quasi-experimental methods to conceptualise and measure deviations from democratic norms. She recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Sciences Po Paris within the Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics and the European Union’s AuthLib project, where she employed large language models to identify illiberal discourse in textual data.
She received her PhD from Corvinus University of Budapest in 2024, co-supervised by University College London and funded by the Marie-Skłodowska-Curie Horizon 2020 FATIGUE project. The project examined the political divergence of Central and Eastern Europe. Her thesis, Essays on Conceptualising Policies Linked to Populist Rhetoric in Europe and Measuring Their Effects in Hungary, applied causal-inference techniques to analyse rhetoric and policy in the Hungarian context.
As a Max Weber Fellow, she will apply NLP methods to a corpus of European election manifestos to identify the parties using the most illiberal language and to trace emerging populist trends. She also plans to develop methodological papers comparing automated and human coding approaches in NLP, map illiberalism through social media analysis, and forecast illiberal tendencies across Europe.

Mentor

• Lorenzo, Cicchi