Welcome!
I am Assistant Professor of Political Science in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Sabancı University, Istanbul-Turkey.
I received my B.A. degree in International Relations from Galatasaray University, Istanbul, and studied Political Science at Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne in Paris as exchange student. In 2012 I received my first M.A. in International Political Economy from Koç University, Istanbul. I then received another M.A. in comparative and world politics in 2015, and my PhD in 2017 from State University of New York at Binghamton.
At Sabancı and Binghamton, I have taught "Quantitative Research Methods" and "Methods and Scope of Political Analysis" at the graduate level, and "American Polarization," "Models of Elections and Electoral Behavior," "Public Opinion and Elections," "Elite and Electoral Polarization," "Political Participation and Voting Behavior," "Political Parties and Party Systems in Europe," and "Understanding the European Union" at the undergraduate level.
My research generally focuses on the effects of political, institutional and informational structures on voting behavior, political participation, and democratic representation. My scholarship has been published or is forthcoming at, among others, American Journal of Political Science, Political Behavior, Political Research Quarterly, and Electoral Studies.
In addition to my ongoing projects you can find here, I am currently working on a larger project based on my dissertation. In it, I investigate whether polarization of party and candidate ideological and policy offerings affects individuals' ideological, policy, and partisan attitudes, and relatedly their decisions to turn out to vote for parties and candidates strategically taking polarized stands. Along with cross-national and cross-temporal analyses of established European democracies, I engage in a number of in-depth studies. I find that party and elite polarization mobilize the electorate, change distributions of their ideological, policy, and partisan preferences, and consequently provide parties and candidates with considerably higher electoral support.
For a recent version of my curriculum vitæ, please click here.
