Last Updated in June 2022
Assistant Professor in Politics (Political Methodology), King's College London
Fellow, Harvard University Middle East Initiative
Working Papers
"The Social Bureaucrat: How Social Proximity among Bureaucrats Affects Local Governance" Under review.
Paper | Award Citation
"Imams and Businessmen: Non-State Service Provision by Islamist Movements" (with Fotini Christia). Under review.
Paper
"Members of the Same Club?: Subnational Variations in Electoral Returns to Public Goods."
Paper
"The Education Dilemma: Favoring the In-Group or Assimilating the Out-Group"(with Asli Cansunar).
Paper
"Teachers against Landlords: Landlessness and Compliance with Compulsory Primary Education"(with Asli Cansunar).
Manuscript available upon request
"How Seasonal Employment Increases Immigrant Urban Mobility: Evidence from Refugee Call Detail Records"(with Ahmet Utku Akbiyik).
Paper
"The Gender Effect in Intra-Party Meritocracy"(with Rabia Kutlu-Karasu)
Manuscript available upon request
"The Education Backlash: How Assimilative Primary School Education Affects Insurgency in Areas of Ethnic Conflict"(with Asli Cansunar).
Manuscript available upon request
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Phi Sigma Alpha Award (best paper presented at the annual MPSA conference), MPSA
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Kenneth J. Meier Award (best paper in bureaucratic politics, public administration, or public policy), MPSA
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Best Paper by an Emerging Scholar, MPSA
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Best Comparative Policy Paper Award, APSA
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Best Paper Award in MENA Politics (Honorable Mention), APSA
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Featured in the podcast series Rocking Our Priors and Governance Uncovered
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Featured in MIT News
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Best Paper Award in MENA Politics, APSA
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Weber Best Conference Paper Award in Religion and Politics, APSA
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Fiona McGillivray Award for Best Paper in Political Economy (Honorable Mention), APSA
Publications
"The Unintended Consequences of Nation-Making Institutions for Civil Society Development."(with Asli Cansunar). Journal of Historical Political Economy, 1(4): 591-613, 2021.
Link
"Combining Mobile Data and Satellite Imaging for Human Mobility" (with Asli Cansunar), in Data Science for Migration and Mobility (Salah, Korkmaz, Bircan, eds.), Oxford University Press, 2022.
Link
"Assessing Syrian Refugee Integration Using Call Detail Records from Turkey" (with Fotini Christia, Constantinos Daskalakis, Elizabeth Harwood, Christos Papadimitriou), in Guide to Mobile Data Analytics in Refugee Scenarios (Salah, Pentland, Lepri, Letouze, Vinck, de Montjoye, Dong, eds.), Springer, 2019:223-249.
Link | Online Appendix
"Enforcement Process Tracing: Forbearance and Dilution in Urban Colombia and Turkey" (with Alisha Holland). Studies in Comparative International Development, 53(3): 300-323, August 2018 (Special Issue).
Link | Online Appendix
"Policy Implications of the D4R Challenge" (with Salah et al.), in Guide to Mobile Data Analytics in Refugee Scenarios (Salah, Pentland, Lepri, Letouze, Vinck, de Montjoye, Dong, eds.), Springer, 2019:477-495.
Link
"Women and the welfare state regime of Turkey," Turkish Policy Quarterly, 11(4): 177-188, Winter 2013.
In Progress
"Urban Bias in Rural Governance" (with Aytug Sasmaz).
Pre-Analysis Plan
"The Effect of Incumbency on Local Political Dynasties and Elite Capture" (with Aytug Sasmaz and Rabia Kutlu-Karasu).
"Scarcity and Discrimination in Local Public Services" (with Aytug Sasmaz and Melani Cammett).
"The Distributional Consequences of the Centralization of Primary Education in Ottoman Istanbul" (with Asli Cansunar).
Abstract
"Islamic Rule, Gender Attitudes, and Domestic Violence" (with Bilge Erten and Pinar Keskin).
“When Bureaucrats Become Intermediaries.”
Policy
"The Geography of Gulenism in Turkey," Foreign Policy, 18 March 2019 (with Fotini Christia).
"Turkish Referendum Rallies in Europe Made Headlines. Did they Affect Election Results?" Monkey Cage/The Washington Post, 6 May 2017 (with Fotini Christia).
Link | Online Appendix
Book Project
The Social Bureaucrat: Social Proximity, Bureaucratic Efficiency, and Local Governance.
My next major project, which will be an extension of my first dissertation paper, will be a book project and focus on the following questions: how do bureaucrats’ ties with each other vary across different social contexts, and what are the implications of this for state capacity and government performance in public services? The core argument of the book is that informal ties among bureaucrats create positive externalities that reduce the transaction costs commonly seen in local governance and increase bureaucratic efficiency. The book will test two major implications of this theory: i) we should observe high bureaucratic efficiency in contexts with high social proximity between bureaucrats, and ii) we should see lower bureaucratic efficiency in socially fragmented districts because social fragmentation makes it more difficult to establish social ties and reduces the reachability of any given individual in the community, including bureaucrats.
I will examine the roots of bureaucratic efficiency in Turkey, a Muslim-majority country characterized by a centralized state structure, which will allow me to examine a diverse set of community structures with varied sectarian, ethnic, and political compositions as well as to rule out potential alternative explanations such as inequalities in government resources, commonly seen in federal systems. The empirical analyses in the book will employ quasi-experimental designs; geocoded data from tens of thousands of villages, schools, and health infrastructure projects in Turkey; and satellite, network, and original administrative data at the district level.
The book will be divided into five main parts. First, I will present the theoretical framework that links social proximity to bureaucratic transaction costs, which stem from informational asymmetries and weak enforcement (e.g., opportunistic behavior, allocative inefficiency, red tape and time costs), and bureaucratic efficiency. Second, I will illustrate each step of the theoretical framework developed in the preceding chapter, drawing on over 170 structured interviews (including closed-ended questions) conducted with officials in more than 6 months of fieldwork across Turkey. The third chapter will present the empirical evidence for the first key implication of the theory: social proximity between bureaucrats, as captured by geographic proximity, increases bureaucratic efficiency. The fourth chapter will present evidence for the second testable implication of the theory by demonstrating that bureaucratic efficiency is likely to decrease in socially fragmented community structures, with a focus on network measures and the ethnic, sectarian, and hometown composition of districts. Finally, the fifth chapter will explain the comparative implications of the theory by discussing how the (positive) impact of lessening bureaucratic transaction costs vary across space and across different types of public goods.