The Department boasts a team of outstanding resident faculty, world-class visiting faculty made up of top researchers and practitioners in the public policy field who bring a wide array of academic and practical subjects to DPP's diverse classroom. DPP has an active program of research with a high degree of publication and other research related output.
The Department convenes a fortnightly seminar program of research papers. As part of their candidature, public policy track doctoral candidates are required to attend these seminars as well as participate themselves by presenting a paper based on their doctoral research, and through critical engagement of other papers.
The Department also convened a high-level Evidence Based Policy Seminar series. This series brought together researchers across multiple departments at CEU interested in empirical issues related to public policy. Invited speakers from both the academic and public sectors in Europe and from North America presented research that uses rigorous methodology to answer pertinent policy questions. Issues ranged from economic development and gender equality to demographic trends, and political economy.
CEU ranks 24th in the world in the subject area of Politics and International Studies to which researchers based in CEU’s Department of Public Policy contribute, and is in the top 100 in Social Policy and Administration.
DPP faculty members serve as editors or editorial board members for several academic journals, including Economic Systems, the International Journal of Manpower, Journal of European Social Policy, and others.
Individual members of DPP faculty play an active role in European and international research networks and consortia depending on their specific areas of expertise. Their projects and publications can be consulted on their personal DPP web-pages.
Recent DPP Research Networks and Projects
A number of faculty in the Department have had solid grant success in the past 5 years. Coordinated by Martin Kahanec at CEU, the European Union-funded (Horizon Europe) BRRIDGE project (2022-2025) harnesses the expertise of the Central European University, European University Institute, as well as National University of Ireland in Galway to help Univerzita Mateja Bela (UMB) build research excellence in the domain of democracy and policy and to advance UMB’s research management and administration capacity, while generating knowledge that benefits society at multiple levels (internal, local and regional, national and international). BRRIDGE will contribute to a deeper understanding of the current democratic disconnect that stems from changes in technologies, inequalities, culture and governance. From this foundation, BRRIDGE will propose tangible evidence-based interventions based on the expertise of the consortium’s members.
Evelyne Hübscher lead the Popconstraints Project (Estimating Popular Constraints in Debt Crisis Management) which explored the political reverberations of austerity, more specifically it investigated voters' attitudes towards austerity measures and assesses the implications of austerity on party competition and party systems. Professor Agnes Batory was the Principal Investigator for the Tropico project (Transforming into Open, Innovative and Collaborative Governments). Tropico aimed to comparatively examine how public administrations are transformed to enhance collaboration in policy design and service delivery, advancing the participation of public, private and societal actors.
Other success stories in research include Marie-Pierre Granger and Simon Rippon who completed in 2019 a H2020 collaborative project on developing a Theory of Justice for Europe known as ETHOS. Professor Martin Kahanec conducted research for EDUWORKS, a project to train talented early-stage researchers in the socio-economic and psychological dynamics of the labour supply and demand matching processes at aggregated and disaggregated levels. Immediately prior to joining CEU, former DPP Professor Diane Stone was a Principal Investigator on EL-CSID – European Leadership in Cultural, Science and Innovation Diplomacy and continues to work with this team on the ‘new diplomacy and public service’.