Month: February 2025

13 February 2025 – Rebeka Kiss delivered a presentation at a workshop on flawed legislative procedures

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On 13 February 2025, Rebeka Kiss delivered a presentation at the “Legal Remedies for Flawed Legislative Procedures” workshop, organised under the auspices of the Institute of Legal Studies of the HUN-REN CSS and the Union of Attorneys for Democracy and the Rule of Law. Her presentation focused on poltextLAB’s research on legislative quality, with particular emphasis on legislative backsliding, the prevalence of legislative basket cases, and the implications of tailor-made laws. The workshop focused on identifying irregularities in parliamentary lawmaking and assessing the legal mechanisms available for their remedy, with particular attention to the role of the Constitutional Court and judicial review. The event also included expert-led roundtable discussions on constitutional challenges in the legislative process and the role of the legal profession and attorneys in the legislative process.The program is available here.

10 February 2025 – poltextLAB presentation at Sciences Po for Love Data Week 2025

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As part of International Love Data Week 2025, under the theme “Whose Data Is It, Anyway?”, Miklós Sebők and Barbara Babolcsay were featured speakers at a key event exploring artificial intelligence and metadata in the social sciences. The webinar, titled “Intelligence Artificielle et Métadonnées en SHS”, was held online on February 10, 2025. The session provided insights into the FAIRwithDDI and ONTOLISST projects, focusing on AI-driven metadata curation and the use of natural language processing (NLP) for automated subject classification.

9 February 2025 – GUEST LECTURE BY GENNADII IAKOVLEV at poltextLAB

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We are excited to welcome Gennadii Iakovlev on the 25th of February as a guest lecturer for our V-Shift Lendület project, presenting his groundbreaking research titled: Affective Elite Polarization in European Parliamentary Speeches: A Novel Measurement Approach Using Large Language Models. The abstract of his research project is as follows. This project introduces a novel measure of affective elite polarization using Large Language Models. We present polarization data aggregated at the party-quarter level over the past two decades for three countries: Hungary, the UK, and Italy. To perform a sentiment analysis on these corpora of parliamentary speeches, we are utilizing pre-trained generative machine learning software. In so-doing, we pinpoint elite attitudes toward various in-groups and out-groups and combine these attitudes into an index of affective polarization. This approach paves the way for creating a time-series, EU-wide dataset of affective polarization spanning the last twenty years. Our findings reveal that affective elite polarization is consistent with, and falls somewhat between, affective mass and ideological elite polarization. The fine-grained party-quarter analysis shows that affective elite polarization slightly increases during elections and country- or party-level crises but more than that significantly decreases afterward. Also, the parties’ polarization is more responsive to party-level than to country-level events —- and so is their aggregated country-level score. Additionally, we find that governing parties tend to exhibit significantly lower levels of polarization compared to those in opposition. The lecture will take place at the HUN-REN Centre for Social Sciences, on February 25th, 2025 at 1:00 PM.