Dr. Ruzha Smilova teaches contemporary political philosophy and history of political ideas at the Political Science Department of Sofia University, and is also a program director at the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, Bulgaria. Her academic research is focused on such issues as the authority of democracy, normative and positive theories of democracy and the relation media-democracy. At the CLS she is involved in research and policy-related projects on quality of representative institutions in Central and Eastern Europe, on the rise of illiberal populism, the relation media and democracy, voting behaviour, participation in politics, among others.
In 2021/2022 she is Democracy Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.
Recent publications include:
(2021 forthcoming) “The Ideational Core of Democratic Illiberalism” in Routledge Handbook of Illiberalism, ed. by András Sajó, Renáta Uitz and Stephen Holmes, Routledge.
(2020) Мислене под карантина [Thinking under quarantine], coauthored with Anna Krasteva and Ivaylo Ditchev, СеминарБГ.
(2020) “The Ideological Turn in Bulgarian Constitutional Discourse. The Rise Against ‘Genders‘, in Critical Essays on Human Rights Criticism, ed. by András Sajó and Renáta Uitz, Eleven International Publishing.
(2016) “Informal Politics and Formal Media Structures” (co-authored with Daniel Smilov), included in Media and Politics in New Democracies: Europe in a Comparative Perspective, edited by Jan Zielonka, Oxford University Press.
(2014) “The General Will Constitution: Rousseau as a Constitutionalist”, included in Constitutions and the Classics: Patterns of Constitutional Thought from Fortescue to Bentham, edited by Denis J. Galligan, Oxford University Press.
(2014) “The Media in Bulgaria: Business Enterprises or PR Divisions of Business Groups?” included in Media Policies Revisited: The Challenge for Media Freedom and Independence, edited by E. Psychogiopoulou, Palgrave Macmillan.