People

Petr Ocelík

Lab leader

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Petr Ocelík is Associate Professor of International Relations at Masaryk University. His research examines how policy networks, beliefs, and public discourses shape policy processes and governance, with a particular focus on climate and energy transitions. He combines theories of the policy process, governance, and socio-technical systems with social network analysis, statistical modelling, and computational approaches.

He currently leads a Czech Science Foundation project studying the evolution of advocacy structures and policymaking in the Czech climate policy subsystem and co-leads the Journalism Science Alliance project, an interdisciplinary project examining climate obstruction. He is also a long-term collaborator in the international COMPON project on climate policy networks. His broader research has addressed energy infrastructure contestation, political participation, policy learning and change, and interactions between policy and discourse networks.

Petr chairs the ECPR Standing Group on Political Networks, co-founded the Czech Network for Social Network Analysis and regularly teaches at the international POLNET Summer School. His research contributed to policy debates on democratic legitimacy in energy transitions. Petr co-authored a number of policy reports for the Czech MFA, Czech-Polish Forum, and Masaryk University.

Harald Waxenecker

Research specialist

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About me

Harald Waxenecker is a Research Specialist at Masaryk University and a doctoral researcher at Masaryk University and the University of Groningen. His research examines how politico-economic power, corruption, and institutional responses emerge from and evolve through complex relational structures. He combines political science and public policy perspectives with social network analysis, statistical network modelling, and computational approaches to large-scale relational and textual data. His research on dynamics in public procurement received the 2026 INSNA Best Student Paper Award.

At REL-POL, Harald works on the Czech Science Foundation project, where he focuses on modeling the dynamics of policy networks, parliamentary and discourse networks. He leads scientific component of the Journalism Science Alliance project, developing relational and computational approaches to studying the role of ownership, interlocking directorates, and funding structures in the context of climate obstruction.

Before entering academia, Harald accumulated extensive experience in applied research and investigative work on corruption, democratic governance, human rights, and illicit power structures in Central America. He continues to collaborate with academic, policy, civil-society, and journalistic organizations in the region, connecting methodological innovation with research on consequential governance challenges.

Petr Vadovič

PhD researcher

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About me

Petr Vadovič is a PhD researcher at Masaryk University studying policy processes in Czech climate, energy, and environmental governance. His research examines how political actors and advocacy coalitions shape policy outputs. He combines theories of the policy process with social network analysis and quantitative content analysis to study advocacy structures, legislative processes, policy instrument portfolios, and parliamentary voting networks.

His doctoral research focuses on linking the input and output sides of the policy process, examining how advocacy structures and political conflict translate into policy objectives and instruments and how these instruments develop over time.

At REL-POL, Petr examines justifications of the policy change, the relationship between advocacy coalitions and parliamentary voting coalitions, and how the adopted policies subsequently respond and adapt to political pressures. Together, these projects investigate how political conflict is translated into legislation and how relational structures contribute to policy stability and change.

Martin Svozil

PhD researcher

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About me

Martin Svozil is a PhD researcher at Masaryk University studying political communication and interaction on social media, with a particular focus on climate politics. His doctoral research examines how advocacy groups, polarization, and political identities are reflected in online interaction networks and how these structures develop in response to political events and across national boundaries. He combines theories of the policy process and political communication with social network analysis and computational approaches to social media data.

At REL-POL, he focuses on the dynamics of climate-policy debates on Twitter/X, integrating relational and textual information to study coalition dynamics, polarization, and the transnationalization of political networks. Methodologically, his work combines network analysis with natural language processing, including domain-specific language models such as ClimateBERT, and increasingly large language models (LLMs) to classify and interpret large volumes of social media content and connect discursive positions with patterns of interaction.

Richard Janák

Research assistant

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About me

Richard Janák is a Research Assistant at the Department of International Relations and European Studies at Masaryk University. His work combines social network analysis with LLM-assisted approaches to large and complex datasets, particularly where relationships of interest are embedded in unstructured sources such as media coverage. He develops computational pipelines for extracting actors, claims, and relationships from textual data, validating them against human coding, and reconstructing them as networks for statistical analysis. Substantively, his research focuses on Czech and EU climate and energy policy, including emissions trading, coal phase-out, nuclear procurement, and electricity market design, drawing also on his applied experience in energy consultancy.

At REL-POL, he contributes to the Journalism Science Alliance project, where he works with investigative journalists on mapping relationships between funding databases and beneficiary organizations. As part of this work, he is building a relational database of EU-funded financial flows, beneficiary organizations, and corporate ownership structures. By connecting information on funding with ownership and organizational ties, his work provides a basis for examining how public resources are distributed across interconnected actors and for identifying patterns that can be investigated through network analysis.