CEU professor wins ERC grant to study illiberal gender policies

Central European University Professor Eva Fodor has received a €2.5 million ERC Advanced Grant for a five-year project on how illiberal governments reshape care, reproduction and social inequality. The research will focus on Hungary, Serbia, Poland and Italy and aims to produce independent evidence in places where reliable public data may be limited.

Why it matters: - The project looks at how illiberal governments affect everyday life, from family policy to labor markets. - It aims to show how reproductive and care policies can reinforce inequality and help entrench political power. - The research could fill data gaps in countries where official evidence may be incomplete or politicized.

What happened: - Central European University Professor Eva Fodor received a €2.5 million ERC Advanced Grant for CAREFARE: Gender, Care and Reproduction: How Do Illiberal Leaders Transform Society? - The project is a five-year study of how illiberal governments use reproduction and care policy to reshape society. - The research will focus on Hungary, Serbia, Poland and Italy.

The details: - CAREFARE will combine policy analysis, interviews, surveys and text analysis using large language models. - The project will examine effects on families, care work, labor markets, gender relations and inequalities tied to class, ethnicity and age. - A core goal is to collect politically independent data in contexts where governments may restrict, distort or fail to provide reliable evidence about social consequences. - Fodor said illiberalism is also a social project and that CAREFARE will examine who is encouraged to have children, who is recognized as deserving care, whose labor counts and whose vulnerabilities are ignored. - CAREFARE will develop new feminist quantitative research methods and new measures for studying gender justice under illiberal rule. - The project will work with local experts, activists and affected communities so the research captures experiences often missed by conventional surveys. - Fodor is a leading scholar of gender and illiberalism in Central and Eastern Europe. - Her recent work includes The Gender Regime of Anti-Liberal Hungary and the article “The Gendered Politics of Illiberalism” in the Annual Review of Sociology. - Fodor’s experience at CEU during the Hungarian government’s campaign against the university shaped the project’s focus on the lived consequences of illiberal rule. - CEU says the university was founded in 1991 and has been based in Vienna since 2019. - CEU says it has about 1,500 students from more than 100 countries and more than 200 faculty members and researchers.

Between the lines: - The grant gives Fodor resources to study democratic backsliding through gender and care policy, not just through elections or formal institutions. - The project frames illiberal rule as something that reorganizes social norms and private life, not only government structures. - The use of feminist methods and local partners suggests the research is designed to capture experiences that conventional datasets often miss.

What's next: - CAREFARE will carry out fieldwork and analysis across the four-country study over the next five years. - The project is expected to produce new measures, datasets and findings on gender justice under illiberal rule. - The research may also inform future debates about how reproduction and care policy shape inequality and democratic decline.

The bottom line: - CEU’s Eva Fodor now has major European funding to study a central but often overlooked part of democratic backsliding: how illiberal governments reshape care, reproduction and social inequality.