Gábor Tóka

Gábor studied sociology and history at ELTE before becoming a political scientist specializing in the comparative study of voting behaviour, political attitude formation, and political communication. Between 1992 and 2020, he taught political science at the Central European University, directed about 40 academic surveys and election studies in six East-Central European countries, served as a founding member of the Planning Committee of Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, as co-principal investigator of the 2004 European Election Study, as academic adviser to two pan-European (27-country) deliberative polls and the European Media Systems Survey, and held research fellowships at the University of Oxford (2006–2008), the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies (2008–2009), the Juan March Institute (2005), the Munck Centre at the University of Toronto (2001), the Woodrow Wilson Center (1999), the Kellogg Center at the University of Notre Dame (1998), and the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (1995–1996).

He joined Blinken OSA in September 2020 to develop, catalog, and analyze an original thematic collection of questionnaire surveys of social and political attitudes carried out in East-Central Europe in the decades since the fall of Communism. His research interests focus on how the democratic process and mass media can assist citizens in producing election outcomes that faithfully reflect their underlying preferences, gerrymandering, non-partisan districting, the long-term impact of electoral turnout on election outcomes and public policy, the impact of discursive practices on attitudes toward disliked and/or disadvantaged groups, and developing conceptual and empirical distinctions between civil versus uncivil forms of partisanship. He is co-author of Post-Communist Party Systems: Competition, Representation, and Inter-Party Cooperation (Cambridge University Press, 1999), co-editor of The Europeanization of National Polities? Citizenship and Support in a Post-Enlargement Union and Citizens and the European Polity: Mass Attitudes towards the European and National Polities (both at Oxford University Press, 2012), and author of several dozen articles in scholarly journals and edited volumes on electoral behaviour, public opinion, and political parties.