Almila Başak

I am a PhD candidate in the Political Science program at Syracuse University and a Research Associate at the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs. My dissertation examines the social policy promises of populist political parties across Europe and sits at the intersection of research on political parties, political economy, and populism.

My broader research agenda examines strategies of political parties and the party–voter linkages regarding welfare. The regional focus of my research is Europe including Turkey. Methodologically, my work draws on a diverse toolkit encompassing survey-based observational inference, qualitative coding, the geospatial data and text-as-data techniques by natural language processing and large language models.

My research has been generously supported by American Political Science Association, Maxwell School of Citizenship, Center for European Studies and Middle East Studies Program of Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs. I am the recipient of Fulbright PhD scholarship (2021-22, 2022-23). I hold an MA in Political Science from Syracuse University and a BSc from the Political Science and Public Administration Department at Middle East Technical University, Ankara.