Lena Weltrich and Paulina Salek-Lipcean have recently joined the Instaparty team.

Lena started as a PhD Research Fellow at the University of Bergen. While undertaking her bachelor’s and master’s degree in Germany, from the Universities of Düsseldorf and Cologne, she has spent lots of time abroad, which made her pay attention to democratic processes and party politics all over Europe.

Paulina joins the team as a Research Assistant at University College London. She holds a PhD in Political and Social Science from the European University Institute (EUI). In her research project, she investigated the trajectories of party and party system development in two post-Soviet republics, i.e. Georgia and Moldova, and the role of formal-legal factors in this process. Before starting her PhD, Paulina completed a BA and MA at the University for Foreigners in Perugia and earned a MA at the College of Europe. Her main research interests include post-communist party and electoral politics, state-building, institutional engineering and politics of transition from the communist rule.