V-Shift

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.

Ádám Kerényi, researcher at the V-Shift Momentum research group, has co-authored the article “The catching up of the Hungarian economy in the European Union and Hungary’s falling behind among the post-socialist member states”, published in the summer edition of the Journal of Government and Economics. The journal is ranked Q1 according to the Scimago Journal Rank (SJR) classification based on Scopus metrics, reflecting its leading position in the field. One of the two editors of the journal is Nobel Laureate Professor Eric Maskin (Harvard University). The article is available here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2667319325000163

On 9 December 2025, guest researcher Nathalie Neptune gave her second workshop at poltextLAB titled An Integrated Geospatial–Policy Analysis of Forest Loss in Hungary. She presented how satellite-based indicators of forest loss and vegetation stress can be integrated with legal and policy data to analyse forest management and wildfire control in Hungary. The workshop illustrated how changes in forest legislation, public spending, and policy discourse can be linked to observable environmental outcomes using advanced statistical methods. The presentation highlighted the importance of combining geospatial and legislative evidence to support data-driven forestry and fire management decisions. The Hungarian Academy of Sciences Distinguished Guest Scientists Fellowship Programme supports this research.

PoltextLAB is a host institution in the Hungarian Academy of Sciences’ (MTA) Momentum MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowship Programme, through which we welcome applications for our V-SHIFT project. The programme supports 16-18 exceptional postdoctoral researchers, offering them the opportunity to work within Hungarian Momentum (Lendület) research groups. This initiative fosters career development in dynamic research environments while enhancing the international visibility of Momentum projects. Additionally, it strengthens Hungary’s R&D and innovation ecosystem and promotes interdisciplinary collaboration across disciplines and sectors. Our research team offers postdoctoral researchers joining the programme the opportunity to use state-of-the-art AI-based methods to investigate the emergence of global powers on the domestic policy agenda of the V4 countries and to analyse attitudes and changes in attitudes towards them. The fellowship lasts up to 36 months. The first round of applications opens on 1 December 2025. Our research team will host postdoctoral researchers until August 2028. Further details can be found here: https://momentummsca.mta.hu/application Source: https://www.facebook.com/MomentumMSCA

On 21 November 2025, Miklós Sebők took part in a panel discussion at the Magyar Hang event space in Budapest during the session How Does AI Transform the Press and Reality?, held as part of the event “Reality, Freedom, Responsibility – Why Does Independent Press Matter?”.

Ádám Kerényi, researcher at the V-Shift Momentum research group, presented at the international conference “High-quality Development of the Belt and Road Initiative: Concepts and Actions” in Beijing on 17–19 November.In his talk, “The Emergence of the Digital Silk Road – Case Study from Budapest”, he highlighted global trends in central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), China’s leading role with the e-CNY, and the growing use of digital currencies in cross-border trade and BRI cooperation. He also presented the Hungarian case, noting the rapid expansion of RMB clearing in Budapest and Hungary’s increasing integration into China’s digital financial ecosystem.

On 13 November 2025, Martin Bánóczy delivered a lecture at the HUN-REN Centre in Budapest as part of the “HUN-REN Cloud Meetup”. His presentation, titled Optimising the Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models, addressed key challenges in computational social science, with a focus on improving the efficiency of text classification tasks. He outlined the limitations of manual coding and presented machine-learning-based solutions developed within the Babel Machine project. Bánóczy discussed three major classification tasks: the Comparative Agendas Project, its extension using an enhanced codebook for media analysis, and a further expansion incorporating media-specific coding schemes. He examined factors affecting model performance and highlighted obstacles that complicate multilingual fine-tuning processes.

A new study by Miklós Sebők, Áron Buzogány, Julia Fleischer, Theresa Gessler, Anna Takács, Sean M. Theriault and Ákos Holányi, titled “Crisis-exploitation or fear-mongering? A research agenda for the comparative study of policy crises and illiberal policy frames”, has been published in Journal of European Public Policy. The paper examines how legislative politicians in Austria, Germany, Hungary and the United States use policy crises (migration and COVID-19) to advance illiberal policy frames (IPFs). Their key finding is that the use of these illiberal frames does not closely track objective crisis metrics (such as asylum seeker numbers or COVID casualties), suggesting that the narrative strategy is one of sustained fear-mongering rather than opportunistic crisis-exploitation. The authors operationalise IPFs via a novel codebook and large-language-model text-analysis across four countries and two issues, offering a systematic research agenda for studying illiberal policy-framing. The full study is available here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13501763.2025.2583176  Sebők, M., Buzogány, Á., Fleischer, J., Gessler, T., Takács, A., Theriault, S. M. & Holányi, Á. (2025) Crisis-Exploitation or Fear-Mongering? A Research Agenda for the Comparative Study of Policy Crises and Illiberal Policy Frames, Journal of European Public Policy. DOI: 10.1080/13501763.2025.2583176.