Leitner Seminar Series: Alexander Bor & Gabor Simonovitz

Alexander Bor is a postdoc at the CEU Democracy Institute's Research Group on De- and Re-Democratization and a Visiting Professor at CEU Vienna. He received an MA in Political Science at the CEU in 2012, and a PhD in Political Science at Aarhus University in 2018, where he also worked as a postdoc until 2022. His research focuses on how the human mind navigates social and political challenges like political polarization, online political hostility, the COVID-19 pandemic, or selecting and evaluating political leaders. His work integrates insights from political behavior, social and evolutionary psychology, and public health. He employs diverse quantitative analytical tools like surveys, experiments and machine learning. His work has been published in leading journals (including PNAS, APSR, and Psych Science) and covered by international media outlets (e.g. New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic). At CEU, Alexander will teach courses on quantitative research methods.

Gabor Simonovits is Associate Professor at the Political Science Department at Central European University. He received his PhD in Politics from New York University in 2018 and he is an alumnus of CEU where he obtained a MA degree in Economics in 2011. His research focuses on both substantive and methodological issues pertaining to the study of public opinion including the study of attitudes towards public policies in the U.S. and inter-group prejudice in Hungary. He has also done work in the field of quantitative methods with a focus on how researcher incentives can lead to the underrepresentation of null findings in published experimental studies. His work has been published or are forthcoming in leading journals including Science, the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science and the Journal of Politics. At CEU, Gabor teaches courses on research methods and political behavior.