The INFOPOLDEM project, launched with the participation of the ELTE Centre for Social Sciences, has received funding under the EUI Widening Europe Programme 2026, with Veronika Patkós as one of the lead researchers.
The project is designed to strengthen internationalisation, competitiveness, and quality in research in Widening countries, and thus foster a more cohesive European Higher Education and Research area.
INFOPOLDEM is an interdisciplinary project, bridging political science, political psychology and information technologies. It advances the agenda initiated by INFOREPOL which developed two online tools to reduce affective polarisation in Poland: a voting advice application (VAA) informing voters about the positions of the presidential election candidates and an interactive chatbot correcting misperceptions about the supporters of different political parties.
INFOPOLDEM is innovative with its combined approach on tackling affective polarisation and anti-democratic attitudes. Hungary provides a highly suitable case for such an agenda: according to several comparative indicators, it is one of the most polarised countries in partisan-affective terms, while having also suffered the largest democratic backsliding in Europe since 2010 when current prime minister Viktor Orbán came to power. The two phenomena are highly intertwined in Hungary, as a regime divide over democracy itself has become a salient dimension of partisan conflict between the government and opposition camps. As such, democratic backsliding both results from and fuels affective polarisation, constituting a vicious circle which suggests that these two issues should be addressed in conjunction.
INFOPOLDEM is expected to have a significant political and social impact, fostering a more collaborative, less polarised society that will step up for the Hungarian democracy. In a backsliding democracy like Hungary, certain polarisation between government and opposition parties cannot be avoided. Our project is inspired by the novel idea of constructive polarisation that combines clearly drawn lines between different parties with a unifying tone towards the population.