The Transnational Institute (TNI) is an international research and advocacy institute committed to building a just, democratic and sustainable world. For more than 40 years, TNI has served as a unique nexus between social movements, engaged scholars and policy makers. TNI has a reputation for well researched analysis on key global issues long before they become mainstream concerns. As a non-sectarian institute made up of researchers, scholar-activists and movement-builders, TNI uniquely combines a ‘big picture’ analysis with proposals and solutions that are both just and pragmatic. Our capacity to build long-term respectful mutual relationships with strategic social movements is helping put radical ideas into movement.

The Working Group for Public Sociology “Helyzet” was established in 2010 by PhD students and young post-doctoral researchers in order to analyze contemporary Hungarian society from a critical leftist perspective. Its members felt that questions of politics and the economy were treated almost separately in Hungarian discourses, while there was an increasing need to understand them as interconnected. Members of Helyzet formulated a critical stance towards social, political and economic analysis in contemporary Hungary, stating that it was limited by the master narrative of transition to an idealized Western European modernity, a narrative that transformed local complexities into exoticisms, and viewed local-global relationships through a primitive linear model of development. The working group observes contemporary Hungary as part and parcel of contemporary European and global power relations. The aim of Helyzet is to connect existing knowledge on global and supranational relationships with local knowledge gathered from the broader sphere of sociology.

The V-Dem Institute is based at the Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg, Sweden.The V-Dem project is an unique approach to conceptualizing and measuring democracy. It provides a multidimensional and disaggregated dataset that reflects the complexity of the concept of democracy as a system of rule that goes beyond the simple presence of elections. The V-Dem project distinguishes between five high-level principles of democracy: electoral, liberal, participatory, deliberative, and egalitarian, and collects data to measure these principles.