Shifting Alliances Among Nationalist Elites: How Do Elites Choose to Participate in the Secessionist Factions (with Basak Taraktas)

Nationalist movements are dominated by various factions at different periods which in turn influences the future of the movement significantly and also the institutional designs that the movement aims to establish. We explore the reasons why secessionist factions prevail in some nationalist movements whereas others are dominated by autonomist elites. We focus on this question through an original dataset containing the interactions of the elites from three minority nationalist movements over a period of 30 years.

Democratic Transition and Party Polarization: A Fuzzy Regression Discontinuity Design Approach (with Fırat Kimya)(2023)

How does democratic transition affect party polarization? While previous literature on party politics in post-transition environments describes a fragmented political system marked by multipartism and the rise of weakly institutionalized parties, party polarization in young democracies is underexplored. We argue that democratic transition reduces party polarization by introducing a new set of parties that have not consolidated their issue positions yet. The ambiguity of party positions makes ideological attributes less salient and renders less polarized party politics. To assess the impact of party polarization in young democracies, we employ a fuzzy regression discontinuity design. We use the Manifesto Project data on right-left positions of parties from 44 countries to measure party polarization and the V-DEM data on regime transition to identify democratic transitions. Our findings suggest that party polarization on right-left issue positions decreases on average, following the democratic transition.