Month: March 2026

13-14 March 2026 – Miklós Sebők’s Presentation on Illiberal Gateway Cities at the University of Manchester

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On 13–14 March 2026, Miklós Sebők presented at the conference “Second Cold War Cities: Geopolitics and Urbanization in the 21st Century,” held at the University of Manchester. Sebők’s presentation was titled Illiberal Gateway Cities as Battlegrounds for Global Power Network Centrality: The Case of Chinese Investments in Hungarian Municipalities. Dr. Sebők also discussed multiple papers during the conference.

26 February 2026 – “Agenda-setting studies in public policy” on AI published in Communication and Change

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A new study by Frank Baumgartner, Shaun Bevan and Miklós Sebők, titled “Agenda-setting studies in public policy: Origins, development, and new possibilities for coding in the age of AI”, has been published in the journal Communication and Change. The article reviews over fifty years of research building on McCombs and Shaw’s seminal 1972 agenda-setting study, charting how this foundational work influenced both communications and political science and giving particular attention to methodological innovation. The authors highlight how increasingly powerful computing, “text-as-data” approaches, automated classification systems and emerging artificial intelligence technologies have transformed agenda-setting research, enabling larger empirical projects and new analytical possibilities.Framed by developments such as machine-learning and AI, the paper suggests future directions for the field that build on classic theory while adapting to new data environments and technological tools. The full study is available here:https://link.springer.com/epdf/10.1007/s44382-026-00021-8

19 February 2026 – poltextLAB researchers on AI methods at LLM Workshop supported by the V-SHIFT Lendület project

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On 19 February 2026, four researchers from poltextLAB – Anna Takács, Barbara Babolcsay, Csaba Molnár and Miklós Sebők – participated in the “Methods Workshop on Large Language Models and Generative AI: Applications in Political Science, Public Policy, and Law”, supported by the V-SHIFT Lendület project and held in Bratislava. In his presentation, The impact of committee chairmanship on successful bill introduction – a multilingual research, Csaba Molnár analysed whether opposition-led parliamentary committees influenced legislative success in Czechia, Hungary, and Slovakia between 1998 and 2023, applying multilingual text analysis supported by the Babel Machine AI tool. In their talk, Using Un- and Semi-Supervised NLP Methods in Codebook Creation for Classification Tasks: Evidence from the ONTOLISST Project, Barbara Babolcsay and Anna Takács demonstrated how unsupervised and semi-supervised NLP methods contributed to the creation and testing of the Light Social Science Thesaurus (LiSST), improving the accuracy and efficiency of automated text classification in social science research.