Policy responses to political crises

Dorottya Szikra is Senior Researcher at the Centre for Social Sciences, Budapest, and Visiting Professor at the Department of Gender Studies, CEU Vienna. She is teaching Welfare State and Gender under  Undemocratic Rule and Critical Theory on Policy and Practice in 2022/2023. She is also associated with CEU Democracy Institute where she leads a CIVICA reseach project entitled Welfare, Democracy, and Populism under the COVID-19 Crisis (WELDECO). Szikra's main research field is welfare state and family policy development in Central and Eastern Europe. Between 2016 and 2020 she acted as the co-chair of the European Social Policy Analysis Network (ESPAnet). Since 2021 she has served as a member of the EC commissioned High-Level Group on the future of social protection and of the welfare state in the EU. 

Heike Klüver is Full Professor and Chair of Comparative Political Behavior at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and Spokesperson of the DFG Research Training Group DYNAMICS. She previously held positions as Full Professor and Chair of Comparative Politics at the University of Hamburg, as Professor of Empirical Political Science at the University of Bamberg, as Junior Professor at the University of Konstanz and as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Nuffield College at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on political behavior, electoral competition and governmental policy and relies on quantitative and experimental methods. She was recently involved in the COVIDEU project, which studies the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on support for the European Union.

Mark Hallerberg is Professor of Public Management and Political Economy at the Hertie School in Berlin. From 2013 to 2018 Prof. Hallerberg served as MPP Director, from 2015 to 2018 as MIA Director, from 2017 to 2018 as Dean, and from 2018 to 2022 as Dean of Research and Faculty.

From September 2020 to March 2022 he was first Deputy President, then Acting President of the Hertie School. His research focuses on fiscal governance, tax competition, financial crises, and European Union politics. He previously held academic positions at Emory University, where he maintains an affiliation with the political science department, as well as at the University of Pittsburgh and Georgia Institute of Technology. He was recently involved in a research project on political narratives of the covid-19 pandemic funded by the DFG.

Michael Becher is Assistant Professor in political science at IE University in Madrid. He obtained his PhD from Princeton University. Before joining IE, he held positions at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse and the University of Konstanz. His main fields of research are in comparative politics and political economy, with a focus on issues related to the functioning of democracy, accountability and representation, political institutions, and inequality. He is also involved in a large collaborative project that surveys attitudes and behaviors in the COVID-19 pandemic, examining issues surrounding compliance with public health measures as well as political consequences of the crisis.