About us

REL-LAB is a research group established in January 2025 at the Department of International Relations and European Studies at the Faculty of Social Studies, Masaryk University. We study policy as a relational process — shaped by interactions among political actors, institutions, policy outputs, public discourses, and economic flows.

Our research is centered on political networks, policy processes, and governance. We are interested in how relationships among actors structure political influence and collaboration, how coalitions form and change, how beliefs and information travel through political systems, and how these processes translate into policy stability and change. Much of our current research examines these questions in the context of climate and energy governance, while applying the relational perspective to a broader range of political and societal challenges.

At REL-LAB, a network perspective is not only a methodological toolbox. It provides a way of thinking about political processes in which actors and their behavior cannot be fully understood independently of the relationships and structures in which they are embedded. We combine this perspective with theories of the policy process, governance, and socio-technical systems, and use social network analysis, advanced statistical modelling, and LLM-aided methods for collection and processing increasingly large and diverse sources of policy-relevant data.

Our research aims to integrate inter-organizational networks, legislative processes, textual and media data, and other sources to study how political structures develop over time and how different layers of governance interact.

Our ambition is to advance a relational understanding of politics that is:

• theoretically grounded and methodologically rigorous
• attentive to the dynamic and multilayered nature of political processes
• open to methodological innovation and interdisciplinary collaboration
• relevant to understanding consequential problems of contemporary governance