Beatrice Bottura

Beatrice Bottura is a Sciences Po master student in Public Policy specialising in Social Policy and Social Innovation. She recently graduated from Central European University (CEU) in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, where she received the  “Undergraduate Outstanding Community Service Award.”

Beatrice is interested in researching the relationship between populism and crises, and how the latter is fuelled by the collision of nation-states and globalisation. Her bachelor thesis, titled “Ethnopopulists’ reaction to crises: the case of Fratelli D’Italia,” analyses the shifts in Giorgia Meloni’s discourse following Covid-19 pandemic and full-scale war in Ukraine and finds changes in attitudes towards the European Union, migration, and national political opponents. She summarised her findings in an article published on the blog of the Horizon Europe project “AuthLIB – Neo-Authoritarianisms in Europe and the Liberal Democratic Response,” a project she is involved in as a research assistant. 

She currently strives to investigate how social inequalities play into the crisis of democracy and the rising support for populist parties as well as understanding if social action can play an active role in countering these phenomena.