Markus Pollak is a doctoral candidate in International Relations at the Central European University (CEU) in Vienna and a DOC Fellow at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. His work focuses on international election observation and democracy promotion. In particular, he examines the impact of struggles on election observation institutions, parallel election observation, and the political sociology of the field of election observation. In addition to his academic work, he is an election observer and research associate at the NGO Election-Watch.EU. As part of OSCE ODIHR missions, he has most recently been deployed to the United States (2024), Kazakhstan (2022), Uzbekistan (2023) and Serbia (2023). Moreover, he worked as EU election observer in Bolivia (2025).
He holds an MA in International Relations from the Central European University and an MA in Political Science from the University of Vienna. He worked for two years as a research assistant for the Austrian Corona Panel Project (ACPP). Among other things, he wrote the ACPP Chronology of the Corona Crisis in Austria. Previously, he worked for the Americas Department of the Austrian Federal Ministry for European and International Affairs (BMEIA), as well as in research and education at UNESCO, the Guild of European Research-Intensive Universities, YFU Argentina, the Holocaust Exhibition Vilnius and the NGO Gedenkdienst.
He is interested in research on liberal international ordering, democracy promotion, electoral studies, and international political sociology (in particular Bourdieusian approaches).