Dr. Trajche Panov is a comparative political scientist working on electoral behaviour, political representation and party politics, with a particular focus on digital democracy and the politics of post-communist Europe. He holds a PhD in Political and Social Sciences from the European University Institute in Florence and has held postdoctoral and teaching fellowships at the University of Bergen, the Università degli Studi di Padova and Trinity College Dublin. He has also been a Visiting Research Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and a Visiting Scholar at the Wilf Family Department of Politics at New York University.
At ZIBR, Trajche is pursuing the project "Party Lines and Blockchains: Ideology, Generation, and the Politics of Crypto Legislation in Switzerland and the United States". As legislatures around the world grapple with how to regulate blockchain and crypto, the project asks a fundamental question: does support for blockchain regulation follow the familiar left-right divide, or does it cut across party lines, separating techno-optimists from sceptics regardless of party affiliation?
To answer this, Trajche applies quantitative text analysis, including topic modelling, supervised machine-learning classification and dictionary-based scaling. The project pairs two institutionally distant legislatures, consensual and proportional Switzerland and the majoritarian, polarised United States, to test whether ideological and generational patterns in blockchain politics hold across very different political systems. In doing so, it contributes to ZIBR's mission of providing empirically grounded comparative analysis of blockchain governance.
