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

  • ItemOpen Access
    Free-Market Socialists:European Émigrés Who Made Capitalist Culture in America, 1918–1968
    (Central European University Press, 2022) Malherek, Joseph
    The Hungarian artist-designer László Moholy-Nagy, the Austrian sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld, and his fellow Viennese Victor Gruen—an architect and urban planner—made careers in different fields. Yet they shared common socialist politics, Jewish backgrounds, and experience as refugees from the Nazis. This book tells the story of their intellectual migration from Central Europe to the United States, beginning with the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, and moving through the heady years of newly independent social-democratic republics before the descent into fascism. It follows their experience of exile and adaptation in a new country, and culminates with a surprising outcome of socialist thinking: the opening of the first fully enclosed, air-conditioned suburban shopping center in the United States. Although the American culture they encountered ostensibly celebrated entrepreneurial individualism and capitalistic “free enterprise,” Moholy-Nagy, Lazarsfeld, and Gruen arrived at a time of the progressive economic reforms of the New Deal and an extraordinary open-mindedness about social democracy. This period of unprecedented economic experimentation nurtured a business climate that, for the most part, did not stifle the émigrés’ socialist idealism but rather channeled it as the source of creative solutions to the practical problems of industrial design, urban planning, and consumer behavior. Based on a vast array of original sources, Malherek interweaves the biographies of these three remarkable personalities and those of their wives, colleagues, and friends with whom they collaborated on innovative projects that would shape the material environment and consumer culture of their adopted home. The result is a narrative of immigration and adaptation that challenges the crude binary of capitalism and socialism with a story of creative economic hybridization.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Civil Society as a Terrain of Struggles:Understanding Illiberal Dynamics through the Agency of Regime-Aligned Civic Organizations
    (2026-04-24) Sebály, Bernadett; Democracy Institute
    Changing civil society dynamics are often interpreted as the state’s encroachment upon an autonomous sphere of democratic activity, presumed to be respected by liberal democratic regimes but violated by illiberal ones. The paper argues that such a normative autonomy/encroachment framework overlooks how illiberal civil society configurations are actively shaped by conflicts and structures carried over from liberal regimes. Through a systematic comparison of organization–state relationships across liberal and illiberal periods, using the case of a Hungarian conservative civic organization, the National Association of Large Families, the study uncovers underlying patterns of illiberal civil society. Adopting a longitudinal and historically informed perspective that foregrounds the agency of actors aligned with the illiberal regime, this study develops a typology of changing state–civil society interactions. The analysis demonstrates how Central and Eastern Europe’s distinctive historical experience—marked by the transition from state socialism to liberal democracy, intertwined with neoliberal globalization—continues to shape the strategies of civic actors under illiberal rule, offering insights of global relevance for civil society studies and civic organizations seeking to counter illiberal regimes.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Rule of Law beyond the EU Member States:Assessing the Union's Performance
    (CEU Democracy Institute, 2024) Bárd, Petra; Basheska, Elena; Begadze, Mariam; Ganty, Sarah; Veraldi, Jacquelyn D; Kochenov, Dimitry; Pech, Laurent; Raimondo, Giulia; Schatz, Omer; Wójcik, Anna; Democracy Institute; Department of Legal Studies
  • ItemOpen Access
    Using Beneficial Ownership Data for Systematic Risk Assessment in Public procurement:The Example of 6 European Countries
    (2026-05-05) Arista, Irene Tello; Fazekas, Mihály; Volkotrub, Antonina; Department of Public Policy
    Despite the considerable interest, there is little evidence on the suitability of beneficial ownership data for systematic corruption risk assessment. This paper aims to validate common beneficial ownership risk indicators for proxying public procurement corruption. By implication, it offers practical insights for research, policy, and investigations. It also generates hypotheses regarding the impact of beneficial ownership registers on the organisation of financial crime. We match administrative data of 8 million government contracts with 11 million companies’ beneficial ownership records in Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Slovakia, Ukraine, and the UK. We estimate fixed effects regressions tailored to capture non-linear relationships between company risk indicators of beneficial ownership and corruption risk indicators of public procurement. Correlations among two sets of differently constructed, yet conceptually related risk factors are interpreted as evidence for measurement validity. We find that BO-based risk indicators capturing unusual and outlier BO features - high company frequency of BO, frequent information change, outlier BO age, and no BO data - all perform in line with expected results. However, BO-based risk indicators relating to BO countries, such as sanctioned jurisdictions, largely fail to relate to public procurement corruption risks in line with expectations. Finally, BO-based risk indicators, which have already been widely validated in the literature using different data sources - company age and political connections - also turn out to be valid. Our findings lend support to the systematic use of beneficial ownership-based risk indicators in research, policy, and investigations. Our new risk assessment tools enable investigators to generate new investigative leads and policymakers to track the scale of likely corrupt transactions in public procurement.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Internationalization, community, and pandemic pedagogies:a reflective case study of a highly international university during the COVID-19 pandemic
    (2022-12-18) Kozakowski, Michael A.; Lucas, Kaitlin A.; Rudnev, Iurii; The Yehuda Elkana Center for Teaching, Learning and Higher Education Research
    Many higher education institutions (HEIs) relied on established instructional models, such as Community of Inquiry (CoI), to inform teaching and learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. This reflective case study at a highly international European university finds five areas wherein internationalization has shaped teaching and learning during the pandemic, and which are undertheorized in existing models: mobility and basic needs, instructional modalities, vulnerability, language, and university alliances. Accounting for these areas enables better analysis of pandemic experiences, and when combined with CoI and Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles, can foster more inclusive and effective learning experiences for students and faculty.
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