Evelyne Hübscher is Professor at the Department of Public Policy. She holds a PhD in Political Science from the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence and a Lic. Phil. from the University of Zurich. Before joining CEU in 2010 she was a pre-doc at the Institute for Advanced Studies (IHS) in Vienna. During the academic year of 2021/2022 she was a Jean Monnet Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies (European University Institute, Florence).
Her research is at the intersection of comparative political economy and party politics. Evelyne has written extensively on the economic, political and strategic determinants of unpopular reforms, in particular austerity. More specifically, her publications (published in the British Journal of Political Science, for instance) focus on citizen’s assessment of austerity measures and to what extent austerity affects the electoral support of governing parties and how austerity changes party landscapes and leads to political polarization and an increasing electoral support of populist parties. Her review article on `Austerity and Populism' (forthcoming with the Annual Review of Political Science) has recently been covered by the Economist .
Together with researchers from the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), she works on a series of papers exploring how Latin American governments can design fiscal adjustments that are a) sustainable, and b) minimize political disruptions. The first out of this series of three papers has been published in Fiscal Studies. A separate but closely related strand of her research focuses on intra-coalition policy-making dynamics and the attribution of responsibility within coalition governments.
Her work has appeared in Comparative Political Studies, the British Journal of Political Science, the European Journal of Political Research, Socio-Economic Review, the Journal of Public Policy, and the Journal of Legislative Studies, among others. Her book on `The Clientelistic Turn in Welfare State Policy-Making' (2018) has been published with the ECPR Press. The results of her research were discussed in various news outlets (Der Spiegel, The Guardian, Tagesanzeiger, RTE Radio).
At DPP, Evelyne teaches courses related to public policy, policy analysis, party politics, and social policy-making for the different MA programs and the Doctoral School. She is involved in the supervision of PhD Students from both, the Public Policy and the Political Economy track, and is interested in projects that focus on the political underpinnings of policy-making in a broad sense.
