Research Bio

Professor Jason Wittenberg is a political scientist whose research investigates political behavior, historical legacies, ethnic and religious conflict, and the dynamics of autocratic and declining democratic regimes, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe. His work combines archival analysis, survey data, and statistical modeling to uncover the historical and contemporary factors shaping contemporary political outcomes. 

His first book, Crucibles of Political Loyalty: Church Institutions and Electoral Continuity in Hungary, won the 2009 Hubert Morken award for the best political science book published on religion and politics. It demonstrates how local clerical resistance to communism in Hungary preserved rightwing political loyalties. His second, co-authored book, Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms on the Eve of the Holocaust, shows that the pattern of mass anti-Jewish violence across localities in Poland in summer 1941 is best explain with reference by robust Jewish support for Zionism. It won the 2019 Bronisław Malinowski Award and 2019-2020 honorable mention for the best English-language book in the field of Ukrainian history, politics, language, literature, and culture. 

Professor WIttenberg, an MIT Ph.D. and former Academy Scholar at Harvard University, has been a Fulbright Scholar at the Central European University, a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo, and a Fernand Braudel Senior Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. 

Research Expertise and Interest

dictatorship, democratic backsliding, ethnic politics, Eastern Europe, religion and politics, voting behavior