Dissertation/Book Project
The Religious Welfare State: Poor Voters, Venues of Exchange, and Welfare Politics in Turkey
Working Papers
"Economic Shocks and Religious Messaging: Evidence from Turkey’s Friday Sermons", with Aala Abdelgadir (Assistant Professor, University of Pittsburgh) [draft available upon request]
Abstract. How do states mitigate public accountability during economic uncertainty? Scholars of political behavior show that autocrats manipulate news media, using blame attribution, diverting attention, and deploying conspiracy theories to reduce accountability pressure. Less is known, however, about how religious messaging in particular can be a powerful tool for avoiding accountability. We examine how Turkey’s Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) deploys religious institutions, and specifically religious communication through mosques, to minimize public scrutiny. Using a comprehensive dataset of Friday sermons in Turkey (2016-2020), we examine whether and how sermon content changed in response to the currency crisis of 2018. Leveraging text analysis, we show that economic topics are increasingly discussed after acute value depreciation in the summer of 2018. Exploratory analysis of the context in which economic matters are discussed reveals that sermons are not used to draw attention from economic uncertainty to divine rewards in afterlife, but is more likely being used to promote an Islamic economic mindset that can shift blame from the ruling AKP to free-market capitalism.
"Robust Emotion Manipulation for Surveys: Evidence from Three Experiments", with Amanda Weiss (Assistant Professor, Cornell University) [Under Review]
Abstract. Many experiments purport to identify the effects of emotions on outcomes like voting, support for authoritarians, and polarization. This paper recasts these experiments as following an implicit instrumental variable design: Researchers field emotion manipulation instruments, but seek to attribute the effects of the instrument to the effects of the emotion. We use this instrumental variable understanding to highlight underlying assumptions in such experiments–including instrument relevance and an implicit exclusion restriction. We then test empirically which standard instruments strongly manipulate target emotions (instrument relevance) while minimally affecting non-target emotions (the exclusion restriction). Across three experiments (N = 6, 649), we study vignettes, autobiographical emotional memory tasks (AEMTs), images, and more as instruments for anger, gratitude, fear, and political emotions. We find that vignettes generally maximize instrument strength and minimize violations of the exclusion restriction–despite the popularity of AEMTs. We also find that positive pre-treatment attitudes toward research may moderate instrument effectiveness.
Work in Progress
"Outsourcing Immigration? Religious Social Welfare and Service Provision to Immigrants in the U.S.", with Nicholas Ottone (Ph.D. candidate, Yale University) [pre-analysis plan completed]
"Political Business Cycles and Means-Tested Cash Transfers: Evidence from Turkey", with Tuğba Bozçağa (Assistant Professor, King’s College London) [data collection completed]
"Survey Research in Online and Offline Settings: Evaluating Design Trade-offs," with Amanda Weiss (Assistant Professor, Cornell University) [pre-analysis plan completed]