Vladimir Bortun

I am a critical political scientist interested in political elites, class, left parties, transnational politics, and the EU. Currently, I work on the Changing Elites project, hosted by the Department of Social Policy and Intervention at the University of Oxford. Here, I focus on the impact of class background on the ideology and decision-making of power elites.
At the same time, I am developing a research agenda around the class character of right-wing populist parties in Western Europe. I am interested, in particular, in their economic policymaking and the class background of their party elites.
My work is rooted in a historical materialist approach and has been published so far in the Journal of Common Market Studies, Capital & Class, New Political Science, Qualitative Research, and European Political Science. My first book, "Crisis, Austerity and Transnational Party Cooperation in Southern Europe: The Radical Left's Lost Decade", was published in 2023 by Palgrave Macmillan.