We are pleased to announce that the 2026 winner of the Carolina de Miguel Moyer Young Scholar Award is Björn Bremer (Central European University).
Björn Bremer is a political scientist who, in very few years since his PhD (EUI, 2019), has established himself as a leading specialist in the study of welfare and fiscal politics in the EU during the post-Great Recession period. Bremer is an Assistant Professor at CEU, Vienna. Before this appointment, he was a Visiting Fellow at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard and a Senior Researcher at Cologne’s Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies. During and after his PhD, Bremer has earned and benefitted from numerous grants and awards, including a John F. Kennedy Memorial Fellowship.
In 2023, Bremer published a book monograph entitled Austerity from the Left: Social Democratic Parties in the Shadow of the Great Recession (Oxford University Press). In addition, he is the author of more than twenty articles in top journals, such as the British Journal of Political Science, the European Journal of Political Research, Political Science Research and Methods, the Review of International Political Economy, and the Socio-Economic Review. He is currently finishing a co-authored book manuscript (with Lucio Baccaro) on the politics of stagnation and reform in the Eurozone, which is under contract with Princeton University Press.
His work so far has focused on two related areas: the study of EU citizens’ preferences regarding the welfare state and fiscal policy, and the European Left’s adoption of fiscal austerity during the 2010s. On the former, well-crafted survey experiments reveal that European publics prioritize some policies more than others, that they resist trade-offs, and that distinct social constituencies rank policies differently. As for the latter, Bremer highlights ideational factors and electoral pressure in order to explain the Social-Democratic parties’ counter-intuitive adoption of austerity policies, subsequently examining the electoral price they have paid for it. Through this work, Bremer displays impressive familiarity with political debates across Europe Union member states and mastery of state-of-the-art methodology.