Kateřina Vráblíková is a Senior Lecturer in Politics at PoLIS. She joined the University of Bath in 2018, having previously worked at The Ohio State University, the University of Mannheim, the Institute of Sociology, the Czech Academy of Sciences, and the University of California, Irvine. She received her PhD at Masaryk University (2012). Her research focuses on comparative political behavior, social movements, and the quality of democracy. She is primarily interested in how societal and state structures shape activism and the preferences of individuals as well as of advocacy groups. She combines quantitative (multi-level modeling, comparative surveys, protest event analysis) and qualitative (semi-structured interviews, comparative case studies, case-control studies) approaches. Geographically, she focuses on advanced industrialized societies, East Central Europe and Kurdistan. Her book What Kind of Democracy? (Routledge 2017) examines how democratic institutions and culture based on an inclusive contestation conception of democracy increase people’s non-electoral political activism. She also does research on grassroots participatory democracy developed and practiced by the Kurdistan Freedom Movement in Bakur and Rojava and liberatory research methods.