Hanna Folsz, a 2025-26 Pre-doctoral Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, has received the 2026 Best Paper Award from the American Political Science Association’s (APSA) European Politics and Society Section. Her paper also received Honorable Mention for the Sage Best Paper Award from APSA’s Comparative Politics Section and Honorable Mention for the Best Paper Award from APSA’s Democracy and Autocracy Section. The awards recognize her article, “Economic Retaliation and the Decline of Opposition Quality,” which examines how aspiring autocrats use economic retaliation to discourage political challengers and undermine democratic competition.

Drawing on original data from Hungary, Folsz shows that opposition candidates and their families often face consequences such as firings, blacklisting, tax audits, and the loss of business opportunities after entering politics during autocratization. Her research finds that these pressures reduce political ambition among opposition-aligned elites and shrink the pool of experienced, highly qualified candidates willing to run for office.

Folsz received her PhD in Political Science from Stanford University in June 2026. Her research focuses on opposition parties in authoritarian, dominant-party regimes, with particular attention to the challenges and opportunities they face in countering autocratization. More broadly, her work examines the causes and consequences of democratic backsliding, populism, media capture, and political favoritism — primarily in East-Central Europe and, secondarily, in Latin America. She uses a multi-method approach, including modern causal inference and text analysis techniques.

Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the American Political Science Association, among others. She is the co-founder and co-organizer of EEPGW, a monthly online graduate student workshop on East European politics, and a co-founder and regular contributor to The Hungarian Observer, the most widely read online newsletter on Hungarian politics and culture. At CDDRL, she has been an active member of the center's Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab.

Next fall, Folsz will be an incoming Fellow at the Harvard Academy and, in 2027, an incoming Assistant Professor of Political Science at IE University in Segovia, Spain. She will continue working on her book manuscript, which examines why establishment oppositions struggle to win elections under democratic decline and how this challenge can be surmounted.