Research Training and Projects

Methods Training:

• University of Delaware- Graduate Methods Courses-Statistical Methods I and II  (Regression Analysis, Survey Analysis, Logistic Regression, Probit Regression)

• Syracuse University- Institute for Qualitative and Multi-Method Research Summer Program (Courses: Within Case and Small N Analysis, Multi-Method Research, Computer-Assisted Text Analysis, and Social Media as Social Science Data)

• University of Michigan- ICPSR Summer Program in Quantitative Methods of Social Research (Courses: Race, Ethnicity, and Quantitative Methodology I; Measurement, Scaling, and Dimensional Analysis; Multilevel Modeling, Regression Analysis, Longitudinal Analysis, Text Analysis) 

• Columbia University- "Text as Data"- graduate course (Spring 2023)       

Programming Skills:  STATA, SPSS, R, Latex, Qualtrics, Microsoft Office

Language Skills:  Turkish: Native; English: Advanced; Russian: Advanced; Arabic: Advanced 

Additional Training: 

International Society of Political Psychology Virtual Academy (November-December 2024). Training in foundational research in political psychology. Topics include word embeddings for natural language analysis in political psychology, power dynamics in humanitarian contexts, multi-method researching in political psychology, designing survey measures, the political psychology of conspiracy theory beliefs, doing research in postcolonial settings, information processing and behavioral decision theory, group identities, and political behavior. 

My dissertation focuses on the dynamics of immigration controls and hostility towards immigrants, as the issue has become central in the politics of many immigrant host countries in Global North and Global South countries. This dissertation aims to respond to two major questions: 1- What are the circumstances under which an anti-immigrant environment prevails in immigrant-host countries. 2- Under which conditions and among whom do anti-immigrant attitudes and policies attain more support. Combining insights from party politics, crisis politics and public opinion literature, the dissertation builds a theory of the anti-immigrant turns and tests it in the cross-national Europe, Turkey and the U.S. data focusing on the shifts in party positions via analyses of manifesto texts and the shifts in public opinion via analyses of the survey data. The dissertation contributes to the flourishing literature on immigration politics and public opinion that explore the causes behind anti-immigrant turns in countries previously known as endorsers of relatively liberal immigration policies. The in-depth exploration of the shifts in the immigration politics and public opinion in two large-scale immigration countries (i.e. the U.S. and Turkey), provides valuable case-driven insights to the discussions on the advent of immigration politics in host states, presenting the effects of increasing salience and politicization of immigration along with crises in two countries one from the Global North and the other from the Global South.

The dissertation mainly focuses on the political drivers of immigration hostility, an aspect understudied in the public opinion on immigration literature. Positioning itself among the elite-driven studies in public opinion, I present that the right-wing populist parties, which are often depicted as the reflectors of the previously ignored public backlash against immigrants, are far from being mere representers of the “anti-immigrant public,” instead, they actively cultivate immigration hostility with their framings of immigration as crisis, creating scapegoating narratives that connect the pressing problems in the country to immigrants, induce anxieties and threat perceptions around immigration. My theory provides an explanation of the anti-immigrant spike where political factors play a primary role. The immigration hostility is constructed and bolstered by the elite cues, boosting threat perceptions and shifting norms around exclusion of immigrants, but also showing its interaction with the structural factors. I argue that elite rhetoric may not always have the same effect across all contexts, instead, several factors such as crises and political polarization may increase the power of the elite framing, making public more susceptible to it. The supportive evidence from the textual data from Turkish and the U.S. contexts presents that anti-immigrant actors play a leading role in the elections and crisis contexts increase the success of anti-immigrant elite appeals by facilitating the mainstream party accommodation.

Another feature of my theory of anti-immigrant turns is that it assumes a dynamicity of the public opinion in relation to the shifts in the political and economic contextual factors, as opposed to studies that suggest the stability of immigration attitudes. I argue that while stability arguments may hold under many contexts, the constellation of three factors in a country facilitates changes in the anti-immigrant environment and the change is mediated by the shifts in the mainstream party positions. The three permissive conditions facilitating the shift in the immigration stance of the mainstream party in a country are the combined presence of a crisis and an anti-immigrant actor under a relatively pro-immigrant incumbent prior to the elections which increase the propensity of the mainstream party’s accommodation of the anti-immigrant actors in its election campaigns, as happened both in Turkey and the U.S. in 2023 and 2024 elections. Analyzing textual data and public opinion survey data, I present that, as has been in the case of the Turkey and the U.S., political parties may change their immigration stance, social acceptance of immigrants may recess and the support for restrictive immigration policy may increase in a country when contextual conditions significantly fluctuate and the three permissive conditions constellate. In addition to the role of contextual factors, in line with the previous works on threat perceptions, I argue that, at the individual level, feelings of economic insecurity and sociotropic pessimism about the economy, authoritarian personality, stronger in-group identity will be positively related to anti-immigrant attitudes. I argue that the role of political ideology and partisan identity will be context dependent, closely tied to the changing party positions on immigration. My research then develops a generalizable analytical framework to comprehensively identify the drivers of outgroup hostility in different national contexts and further theorizes the relationship between the structural conditions, party politics, and immigration attitudes.

I tested my theory using regression analyses of cross-national survey data and salience and sentiment analyses of party manifesto data. My cross-national analysis of Europe utilizes the European Social Survey data along with the secondary data ob-tained from the quantitative text analysis of party positions on immigration in Europe. I use my two case studies, Turkey and the United States, to present how economic and political conditions contribute to the prevalence of anti-immigrant hostility. For my case studies, I rely on both survey data and text data, utilizing publicly available public opinion surveys, original public opinion survey data, and corpora of election manifestos of political parties scraped from the Manifesto Project and American Presidency Project. The chapter on Turkey focuses on the years from 2011 to the 2023 elections. It examines the ascendance of immigrant hostility in the country along with the cost-of-living crisis and anti-immigrant political actors, facilitating the shift in the positions of pro-immigrant political parties. The text analysis of manifesto documents shows the increasingly negative sentiment on immigration and immigrants in the discourse of mainstream political parties in the recent elections, and the analysis of survey data presents that anti-immigrant attitudes are not a marginal phenomenon attributed to far-right, nativist political actors in Turkey but rather dominate public opinion in the country. Consistent with the predictions on the role of economic precarity, the original post-election 2023 survey data analysis reveals the significant positive effect of economic insecurity across all measures of negative attitudes towards immigrants and immigration and shows the conditional effects of political ideology and partisan identity.

The chapter on the United States analyzes election manifestos and survey data from 2000 to the present, tracing the salience and tone of immigration in Democrats’ and Republicans’ election statements. While the text data reveals the trajectory of the political rhetoric on immigration, the surveys unravel the trends in public opinion on immigration. In addition to original survey data in 2019 that assesses the public support for increasing spending for combatting illegal immigration, the study utilizes the American National Election Survey data from 1988 to 2024. The analyses show that while Trump’s initial term induced liberalization of immigration attitude among Democrats, another turn happened during 2024 elections with the shift in the Democratic Party’s election campaign. The findings indicate a weakening polarization, in immigration policy preferences among partisans as opposed to the broader trends in partisan polarization in 2024. The findings from each study discussed in the dissertation provide supportive evidence on the elite’s significant role in affecting the policy preferences of the public. The dissertation shows that the political parties may strategically decide to take a polarizing stance on a policy issue and based on changing strategic benefits, may choose to accommodate other parties in another election year and the changes in party positions will have repercussions in the public. Overall, this study aims to fill a gap in the literature, focusing on the understudied role of contextual political factors in the prevalence of anti-immigrant hostility and connect the findings from the disparate set of works on party politics, crisis politics and public opinion. I presented several parts of this project at ISA (2022), MPSA (2022, 2024), APSA (2022,2024), ASN 2025 and EPOVB 2025 conferences, and currently preparing two manuscripts for submission to a peer-reviewed journal.

This ongoing project focuses on whites’ attitudes toward redistribution in the United States which stands out as an exceptional case where high inequality coexists with low support for redistribution. The U.S. case contradicts the expectations of the mainstream theories which assume that losers of inequality would be more supportive of redistribution. This study examines this implicit assumption, focusing on the relationship between perceptions of racialized loss among whites and redistributive policy attitudes.  Prior works explain less supportive attitudes toward redistribution in the US through conservative ideology, beliefs and perceptions regarding inequality and negative racial attitudes; yet undermine the role of racialized loser perceptions. This paper aims to fill a gap in the literature by exploring the role of racialized loser perceptions in opinions towards redistribution, relying on evidence from an original survey experiment conducted in the US in 2019. We find that whites who perceive themselves to be on the losing side of politics are more likely to oppose government involvement in redistribution, but only when the comparison to non-whites is made explicit. Racialized loser perceptions are found to have these effects even when controlling for renowned factors such as ideology, racial resentment, and party affiliation.