Open Research Repository
The Open Research Repository (ORR) is the official institutional repository of the Central European University. The repository provides access to the research output of the CEU community by collecting open access versions of scholarly works authored or co-authored by CEU faculty and students.
For more information, please contact us at: scholcom@ceu.edu
Recent Submissions
Item The Western Balkans and the EU:Genuine and Sincere?: The Story of Bilateral Disputes and Pretence(2025-08-27)Enlargement is seemingly back on the list of EU priorities. It took a war for it to happen! Indeed, it has been over a decade since the last EU enlargement with Croatia. Other Western Balkan countries have been (im)patiently queuing in the EU’s foyer, waiting for Godot, who never comes despite the promises of his arrival. Meanwhile, Türkiye, an EU candidate country since 1999, dropped out of the league, being almost wiped off the enlargement map after the stalemate in its negotiations with the Union. The EU’s progress with the Western Balkan countries – for which the European perspective was unequivocally confirmed over two decades ago – has stalled due to various issues, including unresolved bilateral disputes. Yet, requesting settlement of bilateral disputes that fall outside the scope of EU law and the jurisdiction of EU courts to reach solutions that can be rejected once the candidate country becomes an EU Member State is rather vain. The current situation is disheartening, underscoring the necessity for a revised approach in the pre-accession process that promotes solidarity, peaceful coexistence, and genuine friendship among states.Item The public that engages invisibly:what visible engagement fails to capture in online political communication(2025-08-13)Measurements of political polarization online have so far largely focused on visible traces accessible through platform APIs, neglecting invisible traces that are not recorded or otherwise unavailable to researchers, which can reveal key aspects of political engagement online. Our study addresses this gap by investigating the polarization measurement bias that arises when only visible engagement is analyzed, uncovering disparities at both the user and channel levels. Analyzing a combined dataset that links survey responses with YouTube digital traces through data donation from a sample of Hungarian Internet users (=758), we find that users who engage visibly through commenting are more politically polarized, and exhibit a greater level of selective exposure to content than users who engage invisibly through viewing. Moreover, ideologically heterogeneous channels are more likely to share viewers than subscribers or commenters. Thus, relying solely on public comment data may simplify, even overstate the segregation of political channels. Our results suggest that research using only visible engagement may overestimate the extent of polarization and the prevalence of echo chambers on YouTube. We highlight the benefits of using combined datasets to address measurement bias in online political communication, and contribute to the polarization literature by providing a fresh evaluation of potential biases in platform-focused research.Item Online Dispute Resolution:A Viable Avenue for Redressing Fundamental Rights Violations?(Cambridge University Press, 2024)This chapter explores online dispute resolution (ODR) as a possible mechanism for redressing fundamental rights violations by the EU. ODR as a form of redress mechanism is one of the main solutions that the EU has repeatedly proposed for the private sector when there were signs of problems with access to justice and the violation of individuals’ rights. This has been the case in consumer law with the ODR Regulation. The chapter gives an overview of various existing ODR mechanisms that could provide ideas for an EU fundamental rights ODR platform. Examples range from pre-trial ODR for small claims to out-of-court dispute settlement bodies under the DSA and the Meta Oversight Board. Embedding a fundamental rights ODR mechanism in the EU system would face challenges both in terms of the legal basis and its actual implementation. The European Ombudsman or the Fundamental Rights Officers of the EU Asylum Agency and Frontex could be a possible institutional choice for administering such an ODR mechanism.Item Bridging Past and Future:Transformative Constitutionalism and Directive Constitutions Amidst Authoritarian Challenges(2023)This article examines the intricate interplay between Transformative Constitutionalism, Directive Constitutions, and the erosion of constitutional values amid incremental authoritarian challenges, using Brazil as a case study. It explores a scenario in which a constitution, initially designed for progressive change, transforms into a shield against retrogression, challenging the conventional definition of Transformative Constitutionalism and Directive Constitutions as forward-oriented models of constitutionalism and constitutions. Focusing on the right to health within Brazil's 1988 Constitution, celebrated as a transformative cornerstone of the constitutional project, the study scrutinizes its trajectory under democratic periods and recent challenges from Jair Bolsonaro's presidency and the COVID-19 pandemic. The case study illustrates how an incremental transformative process faces setbacks, risking becoming a relic of the past. However, it can adapt by being mobilized as a preservative force, actively countering anti-rights initiatives. In these circumstances, it transforms into a resilient entity dedicated to safeguarding the principles it was originally designed to uphold. The study underscores the dynamic nature of constitutional projects and their potential for mobilization with reversed meanings, emphasizing the need for a nuanced understanding of the temporal axis in transformative constitutionalism and directive constitutions.Item Distinguishing mechanisms of social contagion from local network view(2025-03)The adoption of individual behavioural patterns is largely determined by stimuli arriving from peers via social interactions or from external sources. Based on these influences, individuals are commonly assumed to follow simple or complex adoption rules, inducing social contagion processes. In reality, multiple adoption rules may coexist even within the same social contagion process, introducing additional complexity to the spreading phenomena. Our goal is to understand whether coexisting adoption mechanisms can be distinguished from a microscopic view at the egocentric network level without requiring global information about the underlying network, or the unfolding spreading process. We formulate this question as a classification problem, and study it through a likelihood approach and with random forest classifiers in various synthetic and data-driven experiments. This study offers a novel perspective on the observations of propagation processes at the egocentric level and a better understanding of landmark contagion mechanisms from a local view.
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