Bio & Blog
CPW Workshop - 02/09/2023
The Comparative Politics Workshop starts its semester tomorrow with my paper on why elites leave dominant parties in competitive authoritarian regimes.
This work focuses on a wave of elite defections from the ruling AKP in Turkey in 2019 and 2020. I use social media data to measure elites' political networks and their attitudes on three dimensions: media freedom, populism, and the economy. I find that elites' motivations for defecting are primarily selfish. They are unhappy about the weakening of institutions such as parliament and party committees that facilitate their access to power. They do not, however, appear to be concerned about more liberal democratic principles like media freedom.
Comparative politics workshop (CPW) - Spring 2023
Proud to have been a part of the Comparative Politics Workshop during my time as a PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center.
This semester I present a draft of my work on the reasons why elites defect from a dominant party. I always look forward to the close reading that work shoppers give the manuscript (they really read it and give tough but constructive feedback!).
We have a few non-CUNY people coming in, including Sarah Daly and Niloufer Siddiqui. We also will enjoy presentations from CPW old schoolers like Sarah Shah. Really looking forward to this semester!
Jelly fish stings: 0/10, would not recommend
My wife and I took a much-deserved trip to Jamaica last week, during the holiday break. Lovely country! Sunsets on the West Side cliffs were perfect. One fun thing to do on that side of the island is to get outfitted with some snorkel gear and explore the underwater life and caves. You can see sting rays, puffer fish, and colorful schools. There are also, especially in the early morning, a number of seemingly harmless, rather small, jelly fish. Whatever you do, do not accidentally smack one with your elbow. It is a shocking feeling, and you won't be able to do much for the next couple hours!
APSA 2022
This year at the American Political Science Annual Conference I presented a dataset that I'm putting together on elite defections in competitive authoritarian regimes. This work is for a manuscript explaining why party elites defect from dominant parties. As you can see, it's quite large (761 political elites). It's manageable for one person, but it could definitely be a larger project. Variables in the dataset measure several ideological dimensions and are designed to test the importance of ideology for explaining elite defections.
I was very honored to receive the EITM (Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models) Certification Scholarship. This summer at ICPSR I studied Network Analysis and Bayesian Statistics. Both skills will be crucial for my research. These kinds of opportunities are extremely valuable for CUNY students.
catalyst grant
Sometimes CUNY can surprise you by coming through with some money at a critical moment. The Catalyst Grant from the Early Research Initiative helped fund my pivot towards data science methods after my fieldwork was interrupted in 2020. The funding paid for software, coding assistance for reliability, and access to a supercomputer.
The Early Research Initiative has proven to be a pretty awesome center of support for myself and many other students. It's worth checking out!
a little bit about me
I chose to be a political scientist, and I love everything about it (the teaching and the research), but I also prefer to not take myself too seriously. I made this page so I can share some details about myself that are not always about academia.
The picture here shows my first experience as a research subject. I am wearing a brain scanner for a friend's neuroscience study on decision making. She does really amazing work and is now in Berlin where she continues to do her thing.
"To learn a new language is to gain a new soul" is one of those unattributable phrases variously credited to the likes of Spanish nobel laureate Juan Rámon Jiménez or even to Charlemagne. I think it means that new languages give us different ways of understanding and interacting with the world. Take a famous Turkish proverb, which can be roughly translated to "a man without a belly is like a house without a balcony." We can glean much about Turkish culture, values, and norms from this phrase. First of all, Turkish men are body positive. What in English we pejoratively term "Dad bod," Turkish men embrace as a badge of prosperity. Plus, bellies and balconies are natural air conditioners: good for catching cool Mediterranean breezes after a dinner of balık and Turkish rakı. Having lived in Turkey for several years, it's hard to fathom how much I would have missed if I hadn't learned Turkish. The same goes for Arabic. I hear people speak similarly about computer programming languages: that they teach you to think in a different way. That might be true.
I used to read books for fun. I still do sometimes. The most recent book I read was The Periodic Table by Primo Levi. I also try to stay active--rock climbing, hiking, exercise, those kinds of things.