Uploaded August 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Tuesday, September 22 · 6:00 – 8:00 pm
The Office of the President and Rector is pleased to announce the seventh event in the 35th Anniversary Presidential Lecture Series: Kim Lane Scheppele, "Can Hungary Start a Democratic Cascade?"
Since the turn of the millennium, democracy in many countries has weakened and in some cases crashed. Hungary has been the model for many of the aspirational autocrats who have brought democracy down because it fell the farthest and the fastest for the longest. The Hungarian election of 2026 has promised to restore democratic governance to the country. Is this a one-off or can Hungary start a democratic cascade in which other countries follow it back to democracy? What can be learned from the Hungarian experience for other countries, like the United States?
Kim Lane Scheppele is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Princeton University. Scheppele's work focuses on the rise and fall of constitutional democracy. After 1989, Scheppele studied the new constitutional courts of Hungary and Russia, living in both places for extended periods. After 2001, she researched the effects of the international "war on terror" on constitutional protections around the world. Since 2010, she has been documenting attacks on constitutional democracy by legalistic autocrats. Her book Destroying (and Restoring) Democracy by Law is forthcoming from Harvard University Press.
Scheppele started her career in the political science department at the University of Michigan in 1984 before moving to the law school at the University of Pennsylvania in 1996 and then joining Princeton in 2005. Along the way, she was the founding director of the gender program at Central European University Budapest from 1996-1998 and she has held visiting faculty positions in the law schools at Yale, Harvard, Erasmus/Rotterdam, Humboldt/Berlin and Stanford.
Central European University is an institution of advanced research and teaching, dedicated to socially and morally responsible intellectual inquiry.
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Tuesday, September 22 · 6:00 – 8:00 pm
The Office of the President and Rector is pleased to announce the seventh event in the 35th Anniversary Presidential Lecture Series: Kim Lane Scheppele, "Can Hungary Start a Democratic Cascade?"
Since the turn of the millennium, democracy in many countries has weakened and in some cases crashed. Hungary has been the model for many of the aspirational autocrats who have brought democracy down because it fell the farthest and the fastest for the longest. The Hungarian election of 2026 has promised to restore democratic governance to the country. Is this a one-off or can Hungary start a democratic cascade in which other countries follow it back to democracy? What can be learned from the Hungarian experience for other countries, like the United States?
Kim Lane Scheppele is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Princeton University. Scheppele's work focuses on the rise and fall of constitutional democracy. After 1989, Scheppele studied the new constitutional courts of Hungary and Russia, living in both places for extended periods. After 2001, she researched the effects of the international "war on terror" on constitutional protections around the world. Since 2010, she has been documenting attacks on constitutional democracy by legalistic autocrats. Her book Destroying (and Restoring) Democracy by Law is forthcoming from Harvard University Press.
Scheppele started her career in the political science department at the University of Michigan in 1984 before moving to the law school at the University of Pennsylvania in 1996 and then joining Princeton in 2005. Along the way, she was the founding director of the gender program at Central European University Budapest from 1996-1998 and she has held visiting faculty positions in the law schools at Yale, Harvard, Erasmus/Rotterdam, Humboldt/Berlin and Stanford.
Central European University is an institution of advanced research and teaching, dedicated to socially and morally responsible intellectual inquiry.
More from CEU:
Home https://www.ceu.edu/
Facebook facebook.com/WeAreCEU
Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/weareceu.bsky.social
Instagram instagram.com/weareceu
LinkedIn linkedin.com/school/central-european-university
Threads threads.net/@weareceu
Subscribe for more videos:
youtube.com/CentralEuropeanUniversityChannel
