Research Training and Projects

My dissertation focuses on natives’ attitudes toward immigrants in immigrant-host states. The research question is: Under what circumstances is immigration perceived as a salient problem, and do anti-immigrant voices become more vocal in immigrant-host states? My dissertation assesses the role of contextual economic and political factors, an understudied dynamic in the literature, in the prevalence of anti-immigrant hostility in a country. More specifically, I focus on the role of adverse economic conditions along with democratic erosion and political actors’ framing of immigration. Understanding these cross-regional antecedents is crucial to explaining the contemporary global backlash against immigration across immigrant-host states. I theorize that anti-immigrant attitudes will be intensified among individuals who feel economically insecure within contexts where a country is going through adverse economic conditions and experiencing a rising right-wing populist-party presence and democratic erosion. The normalization of exclusion of outgroups under democratic erosion coupled with anti-immigrant political actors’ scapegoating of immigrants as the cause of the crises in the country is expected to produce a large-scale backlash against immigrants. I test my theory with multi-level observational public opinion, country-level data, and computational text analysis of political parties’ election manifestos. The geographical scope of the study includes a cross-sectional analysis of European countries and comparative case studies on Turkey and the United States. My dissertation research develops a generalizable analytical framework to comprehensively theorize what impacts outgroup hostility in different national contexts and further theorizes the relationship between economy, party politics, democratic erosion, and immigration attitudes. Presenting the significant role of contextual factors in anti-immigrant hostility, my dissertation contributes to the public opinion on immigration literature, which heavily delves into the role of merely individual-level factors. 

I test my theory in several ways: the first is via a cross-country analysis of European countries. I have created an integrated dataset that combines individual-level public opinion surveys from Europe (European Social Survey) with country-level indicators obtained from the Quality of Governance dataset. The results show that living in a country with higher democracy scores, generous social protection spending, and lower average income insecurity is associated with lower anti-immigrant attitudes. In line with group-centric theories that focus on sociotropic concerns, I find that economic perceptions, more precisely, perceptions of economic insecurity, both related to oneself and one’s country, play a significant role in individuals' anti-immigrant stances. Secondly, I present evidence from case studies of the United States and Turkey, using election manifesto data and original public opinion survey data. I show the increasing salience and negative stance of right and left political parties on immigration and more hostile public opinion on immigrants under the adverse economic conditions and the rise of right-wing anti-immigrant political actors in both countries. I presented these preliminary findings at ISA (2022), MPSA (2022, 2024), and APSA (2022,2024) conferences, and preparing two manuscripts for submission to a peer-reviewed journal.

In this research project, I investigate the dynamics of the state policy towards Muslim minorities. Relying on press material, legal documents, and secondary sources, I analyzed the trajectory of legal policy making  to regulate the Muslim minorities. My initial focus was the case of Russia; my in-depth analysis of Russian case contributed to the understanding of the politics of religion in the Putin era with discourse analysis of news articles and legal documents and developed an analytical framework that can be applied in understanding the politics of religion and minorities under authoritarian contexts.  My main finding was that the state’s policy on religion/Muslims was closely related to the governance strategies of non-Russian populations and was shaped by the broader processes of securitization and authoritarianization. My study also manifested the nationalization of the religious identities in the Russian case and the close interconnection between nationalist mobilization and religious revival in Russia. I find that the state is actively involved in managing the ethnic minorities via control of religion, setting the discourses on the “proper” exercise of religion, and setting the institutional landscape to establish control over Muslim minorities despite the official policy of “secularism” the separation of the state and religion. Another main finding was the role of historical legacy in the formation of politics of religion manifested in the striking continuity of the state policy towards Muslim minorities since the Imperial era despite the historical ruptures and breakdowns of the regimes in Russia.  

I expanded my research on post-Soviet Russia to a comparative setting; by focusing on the state efforts to manage Islam and Muslim minorities in Germany, Russia, and China.  I find that, despite significant differences in other regards, all three country cases converge in their efforts to set the discourse for “patriotic religion” to curb the potential influences of transnational actors on Muslim minorities and to build state-supported religious institutions often trespassing the conventional secular principle of separation of religion and the state.