I am working with the DEMED team to produce online civic education content that will improve democratic norms across the world. Furthermore, we are also collaborating with a civil society organisation in Turkey, Vote and Beyond, to produce online videos that can encourage and train Turkish voters to register as election monitors. We are using online experiments and field experiments to measure results of these interventions. The ultimate goal is to learn what kind of online civic education content works best to support democratic norms.

You can find the registration plan for our first project here.

For the last two years, I have been working with Sevinc Ozturk (Bitlis Eren University, Turkey) to develop new projects aiming to increase the political participation of Kurdish citizens in Turkey. We are especially focusing on whether the Turkish state institutions’ use of Kurdish language affect Kurdish voters’ political attitudes.

Low levels of female political participation is a problem across the entire world; this is even so in Muslim-majority countries. I am developing a new project with Gulay Dogan (Corum Hitit University) and Egitim-Sen (one of Turkey’s largest trade union confederations) to produce civic education treatments that will increase female participation in trade union activities. Being grounded in the existing academic literature on this topic, these interventions will intend to increase the visibility of women trade union activists, hence encouraging further participation of other women.

This project has received financial support from the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa.