Pálma Polyák Awarded Max Weber Fellowship at European University Institute

MPIfG senior researcher Pálma Polyák is set to begin a Max Weber Fellowship at the Robert Schuman Centre of the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence in September 2025. The program is one of the most prestigious postdoctoral awards in the social sciences and humanities. The academic year 2026/27 will see Polyák working on her project “Who Builds, Who Buys: Green Demand Regimes and the New Global Imbalances of the EV Transition.” In it she analyzes how China, the EU, the USA, Japan, and South Korea are pursuing export-oriented EV strategies and building production capacities, but without the demand to match – and what overcapacities, trade tensions, and unequally distributed climate consequences arise as a result. This work builds on Polyák’s current research at the MPIfG on the global political economy of the EV battery industry. Her main research interests lie at the intersection between international and comparative political economy, where she focuses in particular on the politics of growth models, persistent current account imbalances, and fiscal austerity, always in the context of systems-level factors such as external demand shocks, currency power, and geoeconomics.