Propaganda during economic crises: reference point adjustment in economic news Political Communication (2025), Published Online Paper
In the era of democratic backsliding, information management & manipulation have become a central feature of electoral autocracies. Despite many electoral autocracies experiencing deep economic crises, the incumbents were able to hold onto power. This resiliency is puzzling due to the widespread notion of economic crises leading to regime collapse. In this paper, I introduce an understudied information management strategy, which I call reference point adjustment, employed by pro-government media during economic crises. I argue that government-controlled media increases negative reports about foreign economies during domestic economic turmoil to make the local situation seem comparatively better. Leveraging unique media data from Turkey—spanning 700,000 articles and 13.3 million unique sentences from two major newspapers and an online outlet over 2.5 years— and using supervised machine learning, I find a sharp rise (48% increase) in coverage of foreign economy news by pro-government outlets during an economic crisis. I also observe a significant increase in negative foreign economy news exposure (83% increase) within pro-government media compared to opposition counterparts during these times. This research aims to deepen our understanding of authoritarian politics and media behavior and sheds further light on the democratically backsliding regimes' playbook.
Checks and Balances and Institutional Gridlock: Implications for Authoritarianism Governance (2025), Volume 38, Issue 2 Paper
Recently, the world saw a wave of elected leaders attack democracy. Why do people support leaders who remove checks and balances? I argue that aspiring autocrats gain more popular support when they present these institutions as obstacles to getting things done. In doing so, they exploit a critical tension between the possibility of gridlock and the abuse of power, which is inherent in democratic institutions. Using cross-national data and leveraging an original survey experiment from Turkey, I show that effective checks and balances decrease democracy satisfaction and that aspiring autocrats gain more popular support when they present these institutions as obstacles. More interestingly, respondents perceive the aspiring autocrats' gridlock justification to dismantle checks and balances as a pro-democratic attempt to remove the obstacles to a policy-responsive regime. These results show that aspiring autocrats exploit the tension in democracies, making it harder for citizens to perceive the threat they face.
Correlates of deforestation in Turkey: evidence from high-resolution satellite data New Perspectives on Turkey (2023) , Volume 68, May 2023, pp. 30 - 48 Paper
During the last decade, environmental issues have gained saliency in Turkish politics, especially after the 2013 Gezi Park demonstrations. This article is on the relationship between politics and deforestation in Turkey. It combines possible major drivers—political, economic, and climatic—of deforestation in Turkey with high-resolution satellite data on deforestation to conduct a systemic empirical analysis. The results show that districts in which Justice and Development Party mayors are in power have higher deforestation. The effect is around an average combined area of forty-two football fields in a given district. The article also shows that increased mining activities and newly built hydropower plants positively correlate with deforestation.
Out of Sight, Out of Mind? Electoral Responses to the Proximity of Health Care (with Aslı Cansunar and Gözde Çörekçioğlu) Journal of Politics (2023), 85 (2), 667-683 Paper
Do voters reward incumbents for the provision of public services? In this article, we study the political economy of catchment areas of public services to answer this question. Rather than examining the binary relationship between health care provision and electoral returns within politically defined borders, we study whether increases in geographic accessibility of health care providers and decreases in congestion in services attract votes for the incumbent. Leveraging a health care reform in Turkey, which substantially impacted the geospatial distribution of public health clinics in Istanbul, we find that decreases in walking time and improvements in congestion levels in the closest clinic from a polling station significantly increase vote share of the AKP, the incumbent party, at that polling station. We also show that poorer communities were more responsive to improvements in spatial accessibility to the local clinics.
Truth or Dare? Detecting Systematic Manipulation of COVID-19 Statistics (with Aslı Cansunar and Gözde Çörekçioğlu) Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy (2020) , Vol. 1: No. 4, pp 543-557 Paper
Which countries manipulate COVID-19 statistics? Does the party ideology of local governors affect the probability of data manipulation at subnational levels? How does democratic quality affect statistical transparency during the pandemic? In this article, we apply election fraud detection methods — various digit-based tests that exploit human biases in generating random numbers — to the daily announced official numbers of new and cumulative coronavirus infections. First, we use digit-based tests to identify countries that likely manipulated their pandemic statistics. We then move on to examine the empirical relationship between democratic quality and data transparency. We find suggestive evidence that data manipulation occurred in China, the United States, Russia, and Turkey. Second, we show that non-democracies, as well as countries without free and fair elections, are more likely to release data that display signs of statistical malpractice.
Working papers
Keeping while Giving: The Perpetuation of Inequalities through the Islamic Waqf (with Timur Kuran) (Revise & Resubmit) Paper
In premodern Western Europe, private philanthropy, including charity, never exceeded one percent of private wealth. In principle, this share could have been greater in other regions, for instance, in the Middle East, where Islamic institutions regulated economic life. In the premodern Middle East, privately endowed trusts known as waqfs used their income partly to finance social services. Because they came to control massive resources, waqfs might have intermediated substantial redistribution. Using an original data set of Istanbul waqf deeds from 1453 to 1923, this paper shows that "regular waqfs"—waqfs ordinarily founded by people outside the sultan's close circle—served mainly to shelter wealth and to finance prayers for the salvation of founders and their kin. Supplying temporal social services was among their minor functions; and seldom did these services target the poor. Records of waqf functions and expenditures indicate that they could not have alleviated poverty appreciably. In providing material security to prosperous families, regular waqfs perpetuated material inequalities. Among the services that they funded commonly were prayers for expiating the sins of waqf founders and their families. Hence, the intended effects of regular waqfs included the extension of temporal inequalities into the afterworld.
From Elected to Appointed: The Economic Consequences of Local Authoritarian Takeovers (with Mustafa Kaba and Murat Koyuncu) (Under Review) Paper
This paper investigates the impact of authoritarian takeovers on the rule of law and economic efficiency in local jurisdictions. Authoritarian takeovers refer to the replacement of elected officials with centrally appointed representatives. Using the universe of state contracts in Turkey and a staggered Difference-in-Differences (DiD) design, we document that central takeovers deteriorate the rule of law and cause substantial waste of taxpayers’ money by reducing economic efficiency in public procurement. Specifically, centrally appointed mayors use competitive auctions 33 pp less and instead exploit legal provisions 23 pp more often than elected mayors. Such malpractices inflate contract prices by 24% and reduce value for money by 40%. These results are robust to a variety of tests, including a Regression Discontinuity (RD) estimation. Probing the underlying mechanisms, we find that the removal of local accountability is the key driver of these effects. By contrast, we do not find evidence favoring the coordination benefits from a more centralized governance or politician discretion leading to quality improvement in procurement. We conclude, by altering incentive structures and introducing a moral hazard problem in local governance, central takeovers are likely to cause important loss of social welfare.
Policymakers are increasingly concerned about the revival of superpower conflict. Increased competition among great powers has been especially evident in the exercise of foreign influence, where Russia and China have increased their efforts to influence less powerful nations. To date, the absence of quantitative data has limited systematic investigation of this resurgence of authoritarian influence activity. We introduce a new, country-month dataset tracking reports of influence by Russia and China in 62 aid-receiving countries from 2012 through 2024. We construct the data by applying large langauage models (LLMs) to an original corpus of more than 100 million news articles sourced from high-quality, domestic news sources and use it to describe trends in influence activity over time and across countries. Finally, we exploit the unique features of the data to test hypotheses about Russian influence activity in the months before the invasion of Ukraine. We document a dramatic increase in the use of diplomacy, economic power, and hard power before the invasion. In doing so, we show that this data is useful for both theory testing and foreign policy decision-making.
Favor exchanges and pro-government media bias Feel free to email me for the most recent draft (serkant.adiguzel@sabanciuniv.edu)
A free press is a pillar of democracy, but in our era of democratic backsliding, many aspiring autocrats have undermined media freedom. Extant research has focused on censorship laws and state advertising as tools to capture the media. I argue state contracts in non-media sectors represent an important tool for influencing media coverage. Conglomerates with diverse economic interests increasingly own media outlets. State contracts provide aspiring autocrats with a valuable carrot to incentivize conglomerate-owned media for pro-government coverage. I test this argument by analyzing a vast corpus of newspaper articles from Turkey and exploiting a legal change, which increased the government's discretion over distributing state contracts. Constructing a context-aware bias measure using machine learning and analyzing the universe of all state contracts, I show that conglomerate-owned newspapers are more pro-government than other newspapers. This bias grows with the government's discretion. In return, these conglomerates secure state contracts on favorable terms.
Democratic Backsliding and Media Responses to Government Repression of Journalism: Machine Learning Evidence from Tanzania (with Diego Romero and Erik Wibbels) Paper
One crucial feature of the ongoing global wave of democratic backsliding is that aspiring autocrats seek to influence the media, oftentimes through legal restrictions on the press and social media. Yet little research has examined how formal and social media respond to those legal restrictions targeting the free flow of information. We develop an original argument linking key characteristics of media sources to the regulatory environment and examine how the content and sentiment of their coverage responds to restrictive media laws. We test our claims using an enormous corpus of electronic media in Tanzania and employ two state-of- the-art neural network models to classify the topics and sentiment of news stories. We then estimate diff-in-diff models exploiting a significant legal change that targeted media houses. We find that critical news sources censor the tone of their coverage, even as they continue to cover the same issues; we also find that international news sources are unable to fill the hole left by a critical domestic press. The paper sheds light on the conditions under which the press can be resilient in the face of legal threats.
Paying the dues? Access, Congestion and Bribery (with Diego Romero and Marco Morucci) Feel free to email me for the most recent draft (serkant.adiguzel@sabanciuniv.edu)
Bribery in public service delivery, regardless of its welfare consequences, is a fact of life for citizens in many developing countries. The existing literature on bribery and corruption has argued that citizens with low access to public services are more likely to pay bribes to make up for their lack of access. We argue that sometimes the opposite might be true, with individuals that have better access to public services being more likely to engage in corrupt exchanges with public officials, both because they are socially closer to the public officials, and because their baseline cost for accessing the public service is lower. Using administrative and survey data from Guatemala, we show that individuals that have easier access to public services are more likely to engage in bribery in several ways, as well as more willing to pay higher bribes, and less likely to report public officials for corrupt behavior. Our results imply that policy efforts to improve access to public services in developing countries might have the unexpected negative effect of increasing corruption if they are not accompanied by civil service reform.
Policy reports and briefs
Reporting on Civic Space: Differences in Coverage Between National and International Sources (with Diego Romero, Erik Wibbels, and Mike Sun)
The Impact of Legal Repression on Citizen Online Behavior: Evidence from Tanzania’s Jamii Forums (with Diego Romero, Erik Wibbels, and Nuzulack Dausen)
The Impact of Legal Restrictions on the Content and Sentiment of Media Coverage in Tanzania (with Diego Romero, Erik Wibbels)
