Hanna Folsz

Welcome! I am a 6th-year PhD Candidate in Political Science at Stanford University and a Pre-Doctoral Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. My research focuses on the electoral challenges and opportunities in countering democratic decline. My dissertation develops a theory of opposition traps to explain why opposition parties frequently struggle to successfully challenge authoritarian dominant parties in autocratizing regimes, and why electoral turnover often comes from new opposition electoral formations. I bring evidence from Hungary’s autocratization episode since 2010 using a multi-method approach that combines original large-N datasets, including text data, elite and mass surveys, and qualitative evidence.

I grew up in Budapest, Hungary, and moved to the UK for the first half of my studies. There, I completed a B.A. in Economics and Politics at Durham University and an MSc in Political Science and Political Economy at the London School of Economics. Beyond English and Hungarian, I speak Polish, Spanish, French, and German.

I co-organize EEPGW, the East European Politics Graduate Workshop. At Stanford, I am a member of PovGov (Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab) and DPL (Democracy and Polarization Lab).

If you have any questions about my research, doing a political science PhD, or anything else, please email me at hfolsz@stanford.edu.