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On 24 April, Anna Takács presented at the COMPTEXT conference, delivering a talk titled Mining Inequality Narratives: Parliamentary Framing and Economic Contexts in Central Europe. She shared very early results from joint research within the latest instalment of the ILLFRAMES programme, offering a focused analysis of economic inequality frames in parliamentary discourse and their relationship to broader economic contexts in Central Europe.

COMPTEXT2026 was held on 23-25 April at the University of Birmingham with the co-organisation of poltextLAB. Miklós Sebők chaired in the Annual General Meeting, where he joined Fabienne Lind, Zoe Greene, and James Cross in discussions with a very engaged group of participants on the current state and future direction of the association. Key themes included the challenges posed by a rapidly changing academic and financial environment, possible mitigation mechanisms to strengthen institutional resilience, and proposals for expanding activities, including the development of conference proceedings.

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.

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

The following interns join poltextLAB in the 2025-26 spring semester: During the spring term, the interns will work on political text analysis, help with collecting and cleaning data, and support the development of computational tools for social science research.  

On 10 February 2026, Miklós Sebők delivered a seminar at the Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Catania, titled The AI-Supported Analysis of Political Regimes. Co-organised by the Jean Monnet Chair EuDARe and the Piaceri CRIDEM project, the event presented findings from two AI-assisted text-analysis studies on Hungarian democracy. Dr, Sebők examined changing media attitudes towards COVID-19 vaccines and the spread of illiberal policy frames in parliamentary debates on immigration and the pandemic. He also introduced poltextLAB and its methodological contributions to computational social science.