Convenors
Felix Butzlaff, Central European University, Austria
Felix Butzlaff is a political scientist and postdoctoral fellow at the Central European University in Vienna . He works on transformations of democracy and changing patterns of mobilization, participation and representation through social movements and political parties. He obtained his doctoral degree from Georg August University of Göttingen (Germany) for a thesis on civil protests in contemporary Germany and then worked as an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Social Change and Sustainability at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. In his publications, he analyses how protest groups, social movements, and political parties seek to adapt to new participatory demands from citizens and which implications this might have for the integration capacities of political institutions and for the acceptance of liberal representative democracy.
Cntact: ButzlaffF [ at ] ceu.edu
David S. Siroky is a Professor in the Department of Government at the University of Essex (UK). He studies conflict, cooperation and collective action in politics and economics. Most of this work has focused on three substantive areas: (1) nationalism, particularly its separatist and irredentist strains; (2) the dynamics of insurgency and counterinsurgency; and (3) the politics and international relations of Eastern Europe and Eurasia. He is also engaged in research on methodology, and has mainly worked on (1) big data and machine learning, including algorithmic modeling along with text mining, (2) computational modeling, and (3) causal inference with unobtrusive experimental techniques. He is co-author of Defection Denied: A Study of Civilian Support for Insurgency in Irregular War (Elements in Experimental Political Science, Cambridge University Press). Further information is available at: www.davidsiroky.com and https://www.essex.ac.uk/people/sirok58502/david-siroky