Abstract. Democratic backsliding rarely arrives as a clear choice between democracy and authoritarianism. Institutional harms are often embedded inside broader reform packages, paired with popular policies, justified through selective narratives, or made difficult to evaluate through complexity. My dissertation studies how citizens respond to these bundled political choices. I ask when voters notice harmful institutional consequences, when they overlook them, and why some presentations of the same underlying reform make democratic costs easier or harder to detect.

I develop a behavioral account of autocratic capture centered on complexity, selective emphasis, and information demand. The core argument is that citizens may accept reforms that weaken accountability not because they prefer democratic erosion, but because institutional costs are packaged in ways that shift attention, raise evaluation costs, or provide convenient shortcuts. Across a series of survey experiments, I vary whether harmful provisions are presented alone or bundled with other policies, whether information is directly visible or must be actively requested, and whether favorable cues emphasize reform benefits while leaving institutional costs in the background.

The project connects comparative politics, political behavior, and political methodology. Substantively, it speaks to how democratic erosion can proceed through ordinary policy reforms rather than overt authoritarian appeals. Methodologically, it uses experimental designs to measure attention, information acquisition, belief updating, and decision-making under complexity. The broader goal is to explain why citizens may support political choices that weaken accountability even when the institutional consequences are, in principle, knowable.

Abstract. Many experiments use incentives to increase treatment take-up, but incentives are costly and compliance is often uneven across groups. This project asks how researchers should allocate a limited experimental budget when incentive levels affect both who complies with treatment and how precisely treatment effects can be estimated. I study the tradeoff between sample size, compliance, and cost when treatment effects and compliance behavior vary across strata. The project treats experimental design as an allocation problem under uncertainty. Rather than asking only whether an incentive works on average, it asks where incentives should be targeted, how much should be spent, and when a smaller but more compliant sample can produce better estimates than a larger and cheaper design. The broader contribution is to connect causal inference, experimental design, and decision theory in settings where researchers care about both treatment effects and the cost of inducing compliance.

The project connects causal inference and decision theory by treating experimental design as an allocation problem under uncertainty.

Abstract. Not all political issues are equally useful for studying out-group stereotypes. Some issues are polarized because groups truly differ, while others are promising because citizens strongly misperceive what the other side believes. This project develops a strategy for identifying “stereotype-prone” issues: issues where people are likely to overestimate out-group extremity relative to actual public opinion. I build a database of social-value items from public opinion surveys and use it to select candidate issues for survey experiments. The goal is to separate real group differences from perceived extremity, and to identify where factual correction, exposure to moderate out-group views, or other interventions are most likely to change beliefs about the other side. The broader contribution is methodological and substantive: the project provides a way to choose political issues before running polarization experiments, rather than selecting them ad hoc or relying only on researcher intuition.

Abstract. Disasters are often expected to expose government failure and produce electoral punishment. This project asks why destruction does not always translate into accountability. I argue that severe disaster exposure creates two competing forces: it can reveal failure and increase blame, but it can also make recovery resources more valuable, especially when citizens believe the incumbent has greater control over aid, reconstruction, and access to the state. Voters may blame the government for disaster losses while still seeing the incumbent as the safer route to recovery. Using district-level election data from Türkiye after the 2023 earthquakes, I study when crises generate electoral accountability, when they instead produce incumbent resilience, and why the politics of rebuilding can differ from the politics of blame.

Abstract. Disaster risk does not automatically translate into disaster preparedness. This project studies how federal mitigation funds are allocated across U.S. counties and what kinds of investments risk actually buys. I link FEMA Hazard Mitigation Assistance grants to county-level risk measures from the FEMA National Risk Index and examine whether higher-risk places receive more durable mitigation infrastructure, more flexible recovery capacity, or other forms of preparedness investment. The broader goal is to understand how federal grant systems filter public need before disasters happen, turning some forms of risk into fundable projects while leaving others less visible.

Abstract. Affective polarization carries particular force in backsliding democracies, where citizens often exaggerate the extremity of their political opponents and may distrust corrective information. This study asks whether targeted, issue-specific stereotype correction can moderate those exaggerated beliefs in Türkiye, and whether its downstream effects vary by intervention format and audience. I first develop a data-light targeting procedure that uses existing opinion surveys to identify policy domains on which out-group extremity is especially likely to be overstated. I then field a preregistered online survey experiment comparing two interventions: accuracy feedback about the true distribution of out-group views, and exposure to simulated out-group conversations expressing moderate positions. Accuracy feedback leads respondents in the full sample to see the political out-group as less extreme, with larger corrective point estimates among opposition supporters, whereas conversation exposure yields weaker average belief updating. Those shifts in belief do not translate uniformly into warmer intergroup attitudes. The affective responses are more heterogeneous and often less precisely estimated, with subgroup patterns suggestive of more favorable relational responses under conversation exposure among opposition supporters, who also begin with the largest baseline misperceptions, and less favorable affective responses to accuracy feedback among government supporters. Taken together, the findings suggest that belief correction remains feasible under democratic backsliding, but that its affective consequences depend on delivery format, audience characteristics, and the credibility of the environment in which the message is received.

Abstract. How do citizens respond when incumbents manipulate electoral rules before an election? I test this question with a survey experiment in Turkey that compares an institutional electoral intervention, an extra-institutional unilateral intervention, and a procedural reform framed around European Union harmonization. The results reveal a heterogeneous response rather than a general mobilization effect. Opposition supporters exposed to the extra-institutional intervention show greater support for election-monitoring resources than opposition supporters in the EU-framed control condition, while government supporters show no comparable increase. This pattern is concentrated in support for election-monitoring resources rather than broader participatory intentions. The findings suggest that electoral power grabs can increase opposition support for monitoring-oriented accountability, while leaving broader participation and the precise mechanism more uncertain.

Abstract. Why do some developing countries develop generous welfare state regimes (WSR), while others do not? Which factors lead to varieties in welfare regimes in developing countries? We explain the development of different welfare state regimes (WSR) in the Global South based on the findings of WSR classification. We conduct inductive typological theory on the basis of the structure-institution-agency (SIA) framework and use positive and negative cases selected through a Most-Different-Systems-Design. Our analysis shows that a developing country that satisfies three necessary but insufficient conditions (1. having implemented a prolonged ISI period, 2. having experienced organized contentious politics of the poor, and 3. having developed adequate state capacity) is anticipated to have developed a Populist Welfare State Regime that is more generous and extensive than other welfare state regimes in the Global South. This article contributes to the long-standing debates of Southern WSRs by taking a nuanced and interactive approach that considers the interactions among structures, institutions, and political agency.

Abstract. Since the 1990s, South Africa, like many other countries from the Global South, has provided extensive social assistance for the poor. The literature on these policies, however, is largely dominated by structuralist accounts, and it largely overlooks political factors. We conducted quantitative analyses regarding the South African flagship Child Support Grant (CSG) program and investigated how contentious and electoral political dynamics jointly shape the provision of this program. Based on a logistic regression analysis, we measured the effect of protest participation, voting preference, and their interaction on the likelihood of CSG receipt. Our analysis showed that CSG receipt is much higher among “uncontentious supporters” of ANC and “contentious nonsupporters,” as well as those who join violent protests. This lends support for our argument that CSG is being used as a tool for electoral politics and containment of unrest, providing fresh evidence for political mediation theories of social policy.

Abstract. India, Brazil and South Africa constitute an important subset of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) and emerging powers at large in a shifting global order. The article examines the capacity of these democratic BRICS to serve as a role model to the rest of the developing world, at a time when liberal democracy seems to be experiencing serious challenges and dislocations in the Global North. The article considers the important achievements of democratic BRICS, in terms of their individual performances as well as through active cooperation strategies through organisations such as the India, Brazil and South Africa (IBSA) Dialogue Forum. Attention is drawn to the inherent structural dilemmas confronted by democratic BRICS to serve as genuine role models, given their domestic weaknesses as well as inherent constraints on their collective action strategies. Our central argument is that these countries, individually and collectively, are likely to have a crucial bearing on the future of liberal democracy on a global scale.