Welcome!
I am doctoral candidate and instructor of record in the Department of Political Science at State University of New York at Binghamton, specializing in comparative politics with a focus on voting behavior and political participation.
I received my B.A. in International Relations at Galatasaray University, Istanbul-Turkey, and studied Political Science at Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne in Paris, France as exchange student. I received my first M.A. in International Political Economy at Koç University, Istanbul-Turkey, in 2012. I then received my second M.A. in Comparative Politics and World Politics at Binghamton University in 2015. I currently live in Binghamton, New York, with my beautiful wife Selcan.
I have taught, among others, 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 State University of New York at Binghamton.
My research generally focuses on the effects of political, institutional and informational structures on voting behavior, voter turnout, and democratic representation. My scholarship has been published at Political Behavior, Political Research Quarterly, Electoral Studies, and International Political Science Review.
In addition to my ongoing projects you can find here, I am currently working on my dissertation. In it, I seek to understand whether polarization in party and candidate policy offerings affects the mass public's policy and partisan attitudes, and relatedly individuals' decisions to turn out and to vote for parties and candidates strategically taking polarized policy and ideological stands. In addition to cross-national and cross-temporal analyses of established European democracies, I engage in in-depth case studies of the U.S. and Turkey. I find that party and elite polarization mobilize the electorate, change the distributions of their policy preferences, and consequently provide parties and their candidates with considerably more electoral support.
For the most recent version of my curriculum vitae, please click here.
