Professor Lenka Buštíková
Professor Lenka Buštíková will be joining OSGA in September 2022 as Associate Professor in European Union and Comparative East European Politics, in association with St Antony’s College.
She is currently an Associate Professor of Political Science in the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University. She is also an editor of the journal East European Politics.
She was raised in Prague and holds a PhD in political science from Duke University and MA degrees from Charles University, Central European University and Harvard University.
Her research focuses on party politics, democratic decay, ethnicity, and clientelism, with special reference to Eastern Europe.
Lenka’s book, Extreme Reactions: Radical Right Mobilization in Eastern Europe, won the Davis Center Book Prize in political and social studies (2020) from Harvard University and the Association for Slavic, East European, & Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) and demonstrates that far right parties mobilise against politically ascendant minorities.
She won the 2015 Best Article Prize, awarded by the American Political Science Association's European Politics and Society Section, for her article ‘Revenge of the Radical Right’. She was also awarded the 2017 Best Paper Prize, given by the American Political Science Association's Comparative Democratization Section, for her paper co-authored with Cristina Corduneanu-Huci on ‘Patronage, Trust and State Capacity: The Historical Trajectories of Clientelism’.
Her forthcoming co-authored book, Defection Denied, A Study of Civilian Support for the Insurgency in Irregular War (Cambridge Elements Series in Experimental Political Science), analyses the nature and sources of civilian support for militant groups during wartime utilising unobtrusive survey experiments.
At Oxford, she will work on a new book project about the social origins of illiberalism, exploring the relationship between ‘uncivil society’ and political radicalisation in Eastern Europe.
