Published Work

Below is a list of my publications. Please click on black arrows to display or hide the summary of each item.

Edited Book

• Non-Western Social Movements and Participatory Democracy: Protest in the Age of Transnationalism (2017), Switzerland: Springer (with Dina Rosenberg).▼

  This book analyzes social movements across a range of countries in the non-Western world: Bosnia, Brazil, Egypt, India, Iran, Palestine, Russia, Syria, Turkey and Ukraine in the period 2008 to 2016. The individual case studies investigate how political and social goals are framed nationally and globally, and the types of mobilization strategies used to pursue them. The studies also assess how, in the age of transnationalism, the idea of participatory democracy produces new collective-action frames and mass-mobilization strategies.

  The book challenges the view that most social movements unequivocally seek to achieve higher levels of democratization. Instead, the authors argue that protesters across different movements advocate more involved forms of citizen participation, since passive representation through liberal democratic institutions fails to address mass grievances and demands for accountability in many countries.

Articles

• “Proliferation of religious associations and local incumbency advantage: Evidence from municipal elections in Turkey” (2024), Democratization, pp. 1-30 (with Cemal Eren Arbatli). ▼

  For two decades, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey sustained its electoral performance at the local level. We offer and test a new mechanism that contributed to the party's success in municipal elections. We argue that patronage links with religious civil society served as an important instrument of building and sustaining local incumbency advantage. Employing a close-election regression discontinuity design, we address two questions: To what extent did religious associations proliferate in AKP-controlled municipalities? Was this civil society penetration instrumental for the party’s electoral success? Employing a close-election regression discontinuity design (RDD), we show that in districts with a small-margin AKP victory in the 2014 elections, the number of religious associations in 2016 were significantly higher than in districts where AKP lost narrowly. We also find that the AKP incumbency in 2014 in closely contested districts increased the party’s vote share in the next local elections. Our results empirically demonstrate a new channel of local incumbency advantage. Moreover, we highlight the role of civil society as an agent of clientelistic exchange in competitive authoritarian regimes.

• “Divide and conquer: Presidents, parliaments, and political polarization during electoral campaigns” (2022), Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy, Vol. 3:3-4, pp. 295-315 (with Kemal Kivanc Akoz and Dina Rosenberg). ▼

  Although political polarization is in the center of contemporary debates on democratic backsliding, the institutional determinants of this phenomenon remain understudied. In this paper, we investigate how the form of government can affect polarization levels in a country. Specifically, we focus on the role of executive elections as the primary mechanism. Presenting both a formal model and cross-national empirical analyses, we show that executive elections under presidential regimes are significantly more likely to affect political polarization among citizens. Candidates in parliamentary systems are often party leaders who are committed to party policies and cannot deviate much to disclose new information. In contrast, presidential candidates can strategically design the discourse in their election campaigns, thus influencing voters' opinions and making mass polarization more likely. Our empirical analysis shows that this effect is nonlinear and especially profound when the initial polarization in a country is low.

• “United we stand, divided we rule: How political polarization erodes democracy” (2021), Democratization, Vol. 28:2, pp. 285-307 (with Dina Rosenberg). ▼

  Although there is a broad consensus among political scientists that polarization is detrimental to democracy, very few empirically investigate the links between political polarization and democratic erosion. Most studies use diversity measures that fail to capture contemporary polarization, where the society is divided into two large hostile camps. In this article, we address the gap. Theoretically, we argue that polarization increases animosity between “enemy camps,” making voters more willing to accept anti-democratic measures against the rival group. This tacit approval becomes even more pronounced during election periods, where political controversy reigns and the stakes are higher. Focusing on a specific type of electoral manipulation, we hypothesize that ceteris paribus, political polarization is strongly associated with higher levels of government intimidation of the opposition. We expect this relationship to be stronger in democracies than in autocracies. Empirically, we create our own measure of political polarization based on Esteban and Ray’s widely accepted measure, and test our hypotheses on panel data. In addition to the regression analysis, we offer anecdotal evidence from Turkey, Hungary, and the United States.

• “Armies in politics: The domestic determinants of military coup behavior” (2020), in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics, Oxford University Press, pp. 1-20. ▼

  Military coups happen for various political, economic, and historical reasons. A vast literature investigates the external factors that affect coup vulnerability, including interstate wars, security threats, regional spillovers, and foreign economic linkages. An even more impressive number of studies, going back almost seven decades, focuses on the domestic causes of military coups. These causes of coups can be classified under two broad headings: background causes and triggering causes. Background causes are those structural determinants that generally increase coup vulnerability in a given country and create motives for coup attempts. The most prevalent background causes concern the regime type and characteristics, historical legacies and cultural diversity, and economic conditions. The triggering causes are temporally and spatially more specific conditions that determine the opportunities for coup plotters. Various types of political instability and violence, such as popular protests and civil wars, can become important triggers. Additionally, the characteristics of the military organization and the effectiveness of coup-proofing strategies fall under this category.

  An extensive review of the cross-national civil-military relations literature reveals that very few of the proposed determinants survive empirical scrutiny. Three findings stand out as consistently robust predictors of coup activity. First and most notably, there is broad consensus that the “coup trap” is an empirical reality: coups breed coups. This finding is bolstered by the fact that military regimes are especially vulnerable to coup attempts. Second, income and wealth have a strong negative correlation with coup probability. All else equal, poor countries are more coup prone than their richer and more developed counterparts. Last but not the least, political instability and violence increase coup likelihood, although scholars differ on which exact type of instability or popular unrest is the most significant. Many other oft-cited factors such as colonial legacy, culture, ethnic fractionalization, resource wealth, and economic crisis are not consistently robust in global samples. This observation highlights the need for more metastudies to separate the relevant variables from idiosyncratic effects.

• “Elite survival strategies and authoritarian reversal in Turkey” (2018), Polity, Vol. 50:3, pp. 333-365 (with Oksan Bayulgen and Sercan Canbolat). Winner of the Polity Prize for Best Research Article in 2018 ▼

  What explains authoritarian reversal and resilience in hybrid regimes? This article derives hypotheses from an in-depth case analysis of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s rule in Turkey. The Turkish case demonstrates that authoritarian reversal can happen as a result of strategies pursued by political elites to stay in power. Ruling elites in hybrid regimes endure by using the strategies of centralization, legitimation, and repression. During the 2002–13 period, Erdogan and the Justice and Development Party (AKP) were able to entrench their power by eliminating veto players within the state, building a well-organized apparatus for targeted repression, and strategically making concessions to large segments of the electorate. Since 2013, they have changed their strategies for political survival in response to emerging economic and security problems and the ensuing defections of some supporters, which had rendered the original equilibrium unsustainable. AKP elites intensified repression, further centralized power, and relied heavily on an ideological and polarizing rhetoric to delegitimize and splinter the opposition. We argue that this new equilibrium of high centralization, ideological legitimation, and widespread repression allowed the elites to withstand serious challenges to their rule, while significantly weakening the competitive and democratic elements of the hybrid regime. Our in-depth analysis of elite strategies and their adaptability to changing exogenous economic and geostrategic conditions in the Turkish context contribute to the analysis of the resilience and vulnerability of hybrid regimes in general and of where on the regime spectrum they eventually move.

• “Resource nationalism revisited: A new conceptualization in light of changing actors and strategies in the oil industry” (2018), Energy Research & Social Science, Vol: 40, pp. 101-108.▼

  Resource nationalism is a central concept in the contemporary debates on energy policy. Through an extensive review of literature, this paper identifies the emerging questions on resource nationalism in the last two decades and offers a new conceptualization based on emerging trends in the oil sector. The first section focuses on the conceptualization of resource nationalism, offering an alternative definition and arguing for the necessity of a composite measure. The second section analyzes business-state relations in the oil sector and the arguments on determinants of resource nationalism. The last section compares old and new methods of resource nationalism with an emphasis on three main developments identified in the literature: 1) the change in motives that marks a shift from ideological reasons to pragmatism in state policies; 2) the change in methods from nationalization to creeping expropriation; and 3) the change in actor configuration with the increasing dominance of national oil companies vis-à-vis international oil companies.

• “The international determinants of military coup behavior” (2018), in William R. Thompson (ed.), The Oxford Encyclopedia of Empirical International Relations Theory, Oxford University Press, Vol. 2, pp. 297-321 (with Cemal Eren Arbatli). ▼

  Why do coups d’état happen? Although many studies have investigated this question, they pay relatively little attention to the international causes and ramifications of coups. Especially, empirical studies on the external determinants of coup risk and outcomes still remain limited. There are two current lines of research in this direction. The first line studies international linkages and coup risk, looking at the external determinants of coups: regional spillover effects, foreign linkage, and foreign leverage. A promising angle on this front is focusing on the role of post-coup reactions from international actors to illuminate how coup plotters shape their incentives under outside pressure. The second line of research investigates interstate conflict and coup risk, considering diversionary behavior and external threats as potential coup-proofing strategies. In this effort, studying the relationship between external threat environment and coup risk can be fruitful, whereas empirical tests of the classical diversionary war theory will yield relatively marginal contributions.

  Currently, three issues stand out in the empirical coup literature that should be further addressed by scholars. First is the need for more extensive and systematic data collection efforts to obtain detailed information about the identities, targets, and motives of coup perpetrators. Second, the external sources of leader insecurity beyond interstate conflicts remain an underexplored area. Third, although many studies have tried to determine when coup attempts happen, scholarly knowledge of when and how they succeed remains very limited. More work is needed to uncover the determinants of coup success across different regimes and leader survival scenarios.

• “External threats and political survival: Can dispute involvement deter coup attempts?” (2016), Conflict Management and Peace Science, Vol. 33:2, pp. 115-152 (with Cemal Eren Arbatli). ▼

  Diversionary war theory holds that insecure leaders are more likely to pursue aggressive foreign policies than their more secure counterparts. This hypothesis rests on the premise that interstate dispute involvement helps leaders deter potential challenges against their rule. We offer strong support for this premise by looking at coup attempts. Cross-national time-series evidence from interstate dispute participation over the period 1960–2000 indicates that a country in a militarized confrontation with another state is about 60% less likely to experience a coup attempt in the subsequent year. Consistent with our hypothesis, we establish that it is mainly militarized involvement in disputes, rather than non-militarized involvement, that is associated with lower coup likelihood. The results are robust to controlling for a wide set of potential correlates of coups and remain qualitatively intact when we focus entirely on within-country variations in coup attempts and interstate disputes.

• “Cold War redux in US–Russia relations? The effects of US media framing and public opinion of the 2008 Russia–Georgia war” (2013), Communist and Postcommunist Studies, Vol. 46:4, pp. 513-527 (with Oksan Bayulgen). ▼

  This paper examines the Cold War rhetoric in US–Russia relations by looking at the 2008 Russia–Georgia war as a major breaking point. We investigate the links between media, public opinion and foreign policy. In our content analysis of the coverage in two major US newspapers, we find that the framing of the conflict was anti-Russia, especially in the initial stages of the conflict. In addition, our survey results demonstrate that an increase in the media exposure of US respondents increased the likelihood of blaming Russia exclusively in the conflict. This case study helps us understand how media can be powerful in constructing a certain narrative of an international conflict, which can then affect public perceptions of other countries. We believe that the negative framing of Russia in the US media has had important implications for the already-tenuous relations between the US and Russia by reviving and perpetuating the Cold War mentality for the public as well as for foreign policymakers.

Chapters

• “Shoulder to shoulder against fascism: Publics in Gezi protests” (2019), in N. Y. Belyaeva, D. G. Zaytsev, V. A. Albert. (eds.), Protest Publics: Toward a New Concept of Mass Civic Action, Switzerland: Springer, pp. 33-47.
• “Introduction: Non-western social movements and participatory democracy in the age of transnationalism” (2017), in Arbatli and Rosenberg (eds.), Non-Western Social Movements and Participatory Democracy, Switzerland: Springer, pp. 1-10.
• “Conclusion: The changing face of social movements and emerging patterns across the non-Western world” (2017). In Arbatli and Rosenberg (eds.), Non-Western Social Movements and Participatory Democracy, Switzerland: Springer, pp. 189-197 (with Dina Rosenberg).
• “Turkey’s new path: The rise of electoral authoritarianism”, Research and Policy on Turkey (2014), Vol. III, Issue 12, pp. 76-92.
• “Persistence of military regimes and democratic consolidation: The case of Turkey” (2011). In Daniel Stockemer (ed.), Democratization Around the World, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, p. 13-37.
• “Conclusion” (2011). In Daniel Stockemer (ed), Democratization Around the World, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, p. 185-192 (with Piro Rexhepi).