MEDem at the VII Polish Communication Association Congress in Katowice
On 22 September 2025, the VII Polish Communication Association Congress opened with a session organized by MEDem’s Service Center for Training and Capacity Building at the Silesian Museum in Katowice.
Jakob-Moritz Eberl from the MEDem Headquarters at the University of Vienna introduced MEDem as an emerging European research infrastructure that connects dispersed datasets on the functioning of democratic systems. More than 70 participants from Poland and Central and Eastern Europe attended, including colleagues from the Polish MEDem team at the University of Silesia, Jagiellonian University, and SWPS University.
At the heart of Jakob-Moritz Eberl’s presentation was MEDem’s mission: to make it easier for scholars to study electoral processes across countries by linking existing datasets, ensuring comparability, and creating shared analytical standards. This will not only improve access to scattered data but also provide reliable tools for analyzing democratic change and even forecasting its future development.
Presentation by Jakob-Moritz Eberl
Overall, the presentation in Katowice emphasized the relevance of MEDem for the Central and Eastern European research community. In a context of political change and growing challenges to democracy, scholars expressed a strong interest in reliable, comparable data. MEDem addresses this demand by equipping researchers with tools to conduct cross-national, evidence-based analyses — and by strengthening collaboration between academic communities all across Europe.
The European infrastructure for unlocking the true potential of data-driven democracy research