University of Bucharest

Claudiu TUFIȘ is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Political Science, University of Bucharest, where he teaches quantitative methodology, civil society, social movements, political parties, and democratization. Trained as a sociologist (BA University of Bucharest 1999, MA Central European University 2001), he completed his PhD in Political Science at the Pennsylvania State University (2007), with a major in Comparative Politics and a minor in Research Methodology. His research focuses on people’s thoughts and actions in relation to the political context. This includes political culture, democracy, electoral behavior, and civil society. He is also interested in public policies related to the higher education system in Romania. Since 2016 he is Data Manager for International IDEA’s Global State of Democracy Indices and has recently been appointed as editor-in-chief for the Romanian Journal of Political Science. In addition to teaching, research, and consulting work, he also volunteers his expertise to various NGOs that promote transparency, accountability, and improvement of the political system. 

Luciana Alexandra Ghica is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Political Science, University of Bucharest (Romania), where she also acts as founding Director of the Centre for International Cooperation and Development Studies (IDC). She studied political science and international relations at the University of Bucharest, Central European University (Budapest, Hungary) and University of Oxford, where she specialized in the analysis of international cooperation processes, with a focus on the institutional and discursive impact of democratization on policymaking. During the last decade, she also grew a strong scholarly interest in the study of political science as a discipline and conducted research on the topic in several former communist countries. Author of several studies on democratization, foreign policy and international cooperation, she is also the editor of the first Romanian encyclopaedia of the European Union, co-editor of the first Romanian handbook of security studies. 

Bogdan Mihai RADU is senior lecturer in Political Science at Babeș-Bolyai University and a researcher at the Center for the Study of Democracy. He received his PhD in Political Science from the University of California, Irvine and his MA from the University of Manchester. He held a postdoctoral position at Collegium Budapest and was a visiting researcher for several years at the Central European University in Budapest. He won, as principal investigator, several government-funded research projects focusing on democratization, international development, and political culture, and has vast experience in both conducting research and coordinating teams of researchers. For more than a decade he has also coordinated an MA program in International Development. His research interests revolve around issues of democratization, tolerance, and the study of democratic political culture in postcommunist countries. More recently, he has started investigating the role of public opinion in international relations.