Aytuğ Şaşmaz

I am a political scientist working on political parties, social policy and democratic decline, primarily in the Middle East and North Africa. I received my PhD in political science from Harvard University Government Department (July 2021). During the 2021-2022 academic year, I am a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). Beginning from August 2022, I will be an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Bryn Mawr College.

My book project explores the reasons behind the weak electoral appeal of secular parties in the Middle East after the popular uprisings of 2011-2013 and why they could not form a robust electoral alternative to Islamist parties. Using interviews with party elites, original large-scale candidate surveys, contemporaneous household surveys and conjoint experiments in Tunisia and Turkey, I show that secular parties suffer from disadvantages in political selection and organizational cohesion, which leads to a valence deficit and electoral disadvantage. The dissertation which forms the basis of this book project won the Edward M. Chase Prize for the best dissertation on a subject relating to the promotion of world peace from Harvard University Department of Government.                       

I also study how ethnic and organizational diversity affect the quality of social services, the role of international organizations in social policies for refugees, youth political and civic engagement and how citizens respond to executive aggrandizement. My work has been published or is forthcoming in Comparative Political Studies, Governance, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Development Economics, and World Development.

Here is an up-to-date CV.

Please feel free to contact me for inquiries related to my work at sasmaz@stanford.edu or aytugsasmaz@gmail.com.

HIGHLIGHT: NEW PAPER
ON DEMOCRATIC DECLINE IN TURKEY

How Voters Respond to Presidential Assaults on Checks and Balances: Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Turkey
(with Alper Yagci and Daniel Ziblatt)
Comparative Political Studies, 2022

Why do voters support executive aggrandizement? One possible answer is that they do so because they think this will ease their preferred leader’s hand in putting their partisan vision into action, provided that the leader will continue winning elections. We study this phenomenon through a survey experiment in Turkey, by manipulating voters’ perceptions about the potential results of the first presidential election after a constitutional referendum of executive aggrandizement. We find that voters from both sides display what we call “elastic support” for executive aggrandizement; that is, they change previously revealed constitutional preferences in response to varying winning chances. This elasticity increases not only when citizens feel greater social distance to perceived political “others” (i.e., affective polarization) but also when voters are concerned about economic management in a potential post-incumbent era. Our findings contribute to the literature on how polarization and economic anxiety contribute to executive aggrandizement and democratic backsliding.

WHY HAVE SECULAR PARTIES BEEN WEAK IN THE POST-UPRISING MENA?

This project brings a new perspective to a long-standing question in political science and Middle East studies: Why have secular parties remained weak in the aftermath of uprisings, despite their historical and organizational advantages? Predominant political science literature on the Middle East focuses almost exclusively on Islamist parties. The few explanations derived from extant literature attribute the decline of secular parties to weak ideological support for secularism among the Middle Eastern publics, the absence of institutional venues for secular actors to interact with the electorate, or elitism of secular party elites and cadres. Yet, these accounts have not been tested rigorously. Moreover, they do not explain how secular parties remain strong at some historical times and in some subnational areas but not in others.

I argue that the weakness of secular parties in the Middle East is largely the result of a “valence” problem, rather than an ideological mismatch or absence of mobilizing structures. Secular parties suffer from electoral underperformance when and where they lack trust of voters in their capability to solve problems and deliver socio-economic development. The valence deficit of secular parties has two main sources: First, these parties are characterized by intra-party competition and lack of organizational cohesion, i.e. a deficit in the capacity and willingness of party activists and candidates to collaborate and remain unified. Second, they cannot recruit and select competent candidates, who could have built good governance credentials for the party. Voters who witness in-party fighting and a cadre of politicians who seem incapable of solving socio-economic problems turn to alternative parties, mostly Islamists.

I demonstrate the effect of organizational cohesion on electoral strength with subnational analyses for two important secular parties in the region, Nidaa Tounes and Republican People’s Party, in the most recent local elections in Tunisia and Turkey. In both countries, I conducted extensive interviews with central and local political elite, original and representative candidate surveys, and contemporaneous household surveys. Borrowing from organizational psychology and building on earlier studies of organizational strength in political science, I measured the organizational cohesion of parties at the municipal level and show that it is significantly associated with election results. I substantiate my argument with data from post-election interviews and original household survey data on the potential causal linkages between these variables.

A second source of valence deficit of the old secular-modernist parties in the region is candidate quality: Secular parties cannot attract the most competent segments of their core constituency, urban professional middle classes, neither as party activists nor as candidates. To substantiate this argument, I provide a detailed descriptive account of political selection pipeline of secular parties, bringing together household surveys, candidate surveys and candidate selection experiments with party officials. I then compare them to the political selection pipeline of Islamist parties, and demonstrate that secular parties end up with less qualified, less competent and less cooperation-spirited candidates.

Considering the characteristics of the voter base and core constituency of secular-modernist parties, the difficulties secular parties face to construct cohesive organizations and find competent candidates are puzzling. To explain this, I turn to macro-sociological processes: First, more competent segments of the core constituency of secular-modernist parties, which are derived from the urban professional middle classes, have been in a decades-long process of disengagement from party politics, in part because globalizing economic reforms have changed their life strategies and increased their exit options. Members of this social stratum have the professional skills and resources that could have built both organizational cohesion and governance credentials for secular political parties. Instead, they opted to seize opportunities within the private sector, employment in multi-national corporations, and emigration. Second, as state-builders, secular parties have historically nurtured distinct patronage distribution networks, which are in constant competition with each other on the basis of hometown, sect, or personal animosity between leaders. While these patronage networks ensure the survival of the party by incorporating an extensive network of local branches into the center, they give rise to constant intra-party struggles and push members of the urban professional middle classes further away from involvement. Thus, secular parties cannot build functional and reliable organizations that would have brought them electoral advantage.

For description of original data I collected for research, please visit the Data page of this website.

POLITICAL ORGANIZATIONS AND PARTICIPATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA

How are political parties built and organized in the MENA region? Who becomes a politician and why? How do the party elites and novice politicians react to institutional rules, citizens’ requests and social movements around them?

• “Local Political Priorities during Tunisia’s First Democratic Municipal Elections” (with Alex Blackman and Julia Clark), in Governance and Local Development in the Middle East and North Africa (Kristen Kao and Ellen Lust, eds.), New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming. 
• “What Men Want: Politicians’ Strategic Response to Gender Quotas in Tunisia’s 2018 Municipal Elections,” (with Alexandra Blackman and Julia Clark) – under review
• “Political Accountability in New Democracies” (with Chantal Berman, Alexandra Blackman and Julia Clark) – presented at MPSA 2019 [EGAP pre-analysis plan]
• “How do Party Members Respond to Top-Down Moderation: Evidence from the Islamist Party in Tunisia” (with Alexandra Blackman and Julia Clark) – presented at Political Parties in Africa conference
• “Local Political Dynasties in Turkey” (with Tugba Bozcaga and Rabia Kutlu) – in progress

SOCIAL SERVICES IN THE CONTEXT OF ETHNIC AND ORGANIZATIONAL DIVERSITY

INSTITUTIONAL DESIGN OF LOCAL GOVERNANCE

OP-EDs & BRIEFS

• “CHP’nin Dönüşümünde ve Seçim Başarısında Parti Örgütlerinin Rolü”
  Policy brief published by Turkish Foundation for Social, Economic and Political Studies. Also published as a three-part op-ed series at PolitikYol website (1, 2, 3).   
• “The Collapse of Tunisia’s Party System and the Rise of Kais Saied” (with Nate Grubman). Analysis piece in MERIP Online. August 2021.
• “Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia is a mosque again. Do Turkish citizens want Erdogan to restore the caliphate?” (with Tarek Masoud). Analysis piece at the Monkey Cage Blog of The Washington Post. July 2020.
• “Who really won Tunisia’s first democratic local elections?” Analysis piece at the Monkey Cage Blog of The Washington Post.
• “One third of municipal councilors in Tunisia are from independent lists. How independent are they?” Democracy International (with Alexandra Blackman and Julia Clark), July 2018. [English] [Arabic]
• “Generational divide in Tunisia’s 2018 municipal elections: Are youth candidates different?” Democracy International (with Alexandra Blackman and Julia Clark), July 2018. [English] [Arabic]
• “List fillers or future leaders? Female candidates in Tunisia’s 2018 municipal elections.” Democracy International (with Alexandra Blackman and Julia Clark), July 2018. [English] [Arabic]
• “Introducing the Tunisian local election candidate survey (LECS): A new approach to studying local governance.” Democracy International (with Alexandra Blackman and Julia Clark), July 2018. [English] [Arabic]

BRYN MAWR COLLEGE, FALL 2022

Pols B283: Middle East Politics
This course offers an overview on the contemporary politics of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and the relevant social (mostly political) science work on it. It brings together empirical knowledge on domestic and transnational politics in different countries of the region and how empirical political science around the big questions is conducted. Each module of the course revolves around a central question that has been keeping social and political scientists busy in the last decades: What triggers risky protest movements in authoritarian settings? Why has the MENA region remained authoritarian despite successive global waves of democratization? Under which conditions do transitions to democracies succeed? Do monarchies in the Middle East have an advantage in ensuring political stability, and if so, why? Is it impossible to ensure good governance and peace at the same time in divided societies? What motivates people to take up arms in the name of religion and sect? What are the reasons behind the economic underdevelopment of the MENA region? Students are also invited to think about these “big questions” and take MENA countries as their case studies, while at the same significantly enhancing their contextual knowledge about the region. No prerequisites, but either some prior familiarity with the Middle East or a prior political science course encouraged.

HARVARD UNIVERSITY TEACHING FELLOWSHIPS

• GenEd 1008: Power and Identity in the Middle East (Spring 2020)
  Evaluations cancelled due to the pandemic
  
• Gov 20: Foundations of Comparative Politics (Fall 2019)
  Evaluation score: 4.6/5
  Won Bok Center’s Excellence in Teaching award
  
• Gov 50: Introduction to Political Science Research Methods (Spring 2017)
  Evaluation score: 5.0/5
  Won Bok Center’s Excellence in Teaching award
  
• Gov 1207: Comparative Politics of the Middle East (Fall 2016)
  Evaluation score: 4.3/5

Student evaluation reports from both Harvard College and Harvard Extension School are available upon request.

Throughout my doctoral study and research consultancy, I worked on collecting original data in challenging contexts, such as collecting candidate data in in the first ever democratic local elections in Tunisia, primary health care centers in Lebanon and a survey experiment just one week before the first ever presidential elections in Turkey.

This page presents information on (some) original data collection projects I have been involved in. If you are interested in using these datasets for research, please contact me at sasmaz@stanford.edu or aytugsasmaz@gmail.com.

SOCIO-POLITICAL DETERMINANTS OF HEALTH CARE QUALITY IN LEBANON

• With Melani Cammett (overall principal investigator), and Carmel Salhi and Lara Jirmanus (advisors for public health and medicine-related question modules)
• Collected data in 68 primary health care centers in Lebanon
• Components included: A survey with chief medical officers, a survey with ~220 doctors, a multiple-choice test with ~170 doctors, direct observation of ~1200 patient-doctor interactions, exit interviews with ~1200 patients
• Supported by the Middle East Initiative and the Emirates Leadership Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School
• Data and code for “Navigating Welfare Regimes…” (Governance, 2021) available here
  

LOCAL ELECTION CANDIDATE SURVEY – TUNISIA

• With Alex Blackman and Julia Clark
• Survey with ~2000 candidates in ~100 municipalities from almost all parties and independent lists, just before the first democratic local elections in Tunisia in 2018
• More information on data collection can be found here
• Supported by Democracy International, Freeman Spogli Institute (Stanford), Project on Middle East Political Science, Institute for Quantitative Social Science (Harvard)

LOCAL ELECTION CANDIDATE SURVEY – TURKEY

• Survey with ~400 candidates in 25 municipalities just before the 2019 local elections (candidates were from the main secular party, CHP, and the main Islamist party, AKP)
• Question modules included views on political issues, opinions on party organization, individual and family political background, collective orientation, internal political efficacy, among others
• Question form (in Turkish) can be found here
• Supported by Institute for Quantitative Social Science (Harvard)

LOCAL ELECTION HOUSEHOLD SURVEY – TURKEY

• With Tarek Masoud
• Collected data from 2500 households in 50 districts of Turkey, just before the 2019 local elections
• Question modules included vote choice, views on political parties and secularism, views on foreign countries and leaders, active political participation, individual and family political background, collective orientation, internal political efficacy, among others
• Supported by the Middle East Initiative (Harvard Kennedy School)

SURVEY EXPERIMENT ON SUPPORT FOR SUPER-PRESIDENTIALISM IN TURKEY

• With Alper Yagci and Daniel Ziblatt
• Collected data from ~2000 households in 125 neighborhoods in Istanbul, Turkey, just before 2018 presidential elections
• Random assignment to different polling results, outcome variable is change in support for super-presidentialism
• Supported by Ozyegin University and Center for European Studies (Harvard)