Alper Şükrü Gençer

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at New York University. My research examines democratic accountability and political behavior, with a focus on how citizens evaluate political choices under conditions of complexity, polarization, and crisis. My work spans democratic backsliding, affective polarization, electoral accountability, and the political allocation of public resources.

My job market paper, “Unbundling Autocratic Capture: Complexity, Selective Emphasis, and Support for Harmful Reform Bundles,” develops a behavioral account of how democratic erosion can gain public acceptance. I argue that citizens may support reforms that weaken democratic institutions not because they prefer backsliding, but because institutional harms are embedded in broader policy packages, made harder to evaluate through complexity, or obscured by selective emphasis. I test this argument through a series of survey experiments that examine attention, information processing, and political choice.

My broader research studies when citizens mobilize against threats to democratic accountability, how partisan stereotypes shape political judgment, and how crises affect both electoral accountability and public investment. Methodologically, I use survey and field experiments, causal inference, formal theory, and computational methods, and I also develop new approaches to experimental design and the measurement of political beliefs and misperceptions. My research has been supported by an APSA Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant, the Identities & Ideologies Project at NYU, and the NYU George Downs Prize.