Turkey’s Imaginary need for Presidentialism: What would Erdogan’s latest project bring to the country?

Much has been written about the growing demand of the Turkish political elite for the presidential system, though relatively little is known about the potential consequences of replacing the parliamentary democracy with an executive presidency. While President Erdogan’s call for a constitutional change shows no sign of abating, several cabinet members and senior Justice and Development Party (AKP) officials became vocal in their support for the presidential system and its potential benefits in the long run, many of whom cited ‘system fragility’ and ‘inefficiency’ as the main reasons why the presidential system can outperform a parliamentary one in Turkey. The rationale for a regime preference that the government officials put forward shows that we are far from understanding the downsides of adopting the presidential system for Turkey in the long run

Stability and change in the public’s policy agenda: a punctuated equilibrium approach

Much research within the punctuated equilibrium framework demonstrated that policy agendas are invariably punctuated, due in part to cognitive and institutional frictions that constitute barriers to change in attention. While the bulk of past scholarship explored the extent to which institutional friction varies by organizational design, little scholarly attention has been devoted to the empirical examination of the cognitive aspect of disproportionate information processing. In an attempt to close this gap, I utilize a newly available dataset that codes nearly a million Americans’ responses to the ‘most important problem’ question from 1939 to 2015 to analyze the distribution of annual changes in the policy priorities of the American public. Drawing on the punctuated equilibrium theory literature, I argue and show that punctuations in the public’s policy priorities are more severe and frequent than those in institutional agendas. These results emphasize the need for a more subtle treatment of disproportionate information processing within the public, calling for relaxing the implicit assumption that cognitive friction is constant within organizations and across issues.publishedVersio

An attentional theory of issue-carrying capacity

A plethora of research in cognitive and behavioral psychology showed that there are significant differences in the way men and women process political and social information. It has been widely accepted that women show more social concern for and tend to be more reactive to the problems in their social environments. The potential implications of these distinct cognitive styles, however, have received scant academic attention in political science research. In particular, we have scant knowledge of the extent to which differing cognitive styles affect the scope of problem identification and prioritization. Integrating insights from both political behavior and psychology research, this dissertation argues that women's lower cognitive threshold of urgency for societal issues should have important political implications. More specifically, argue that, compared with their male counterparts, female decision makers should attend to a wider variety of societal issues facing their country. My empirical strategy is two-fold. First, with over 930,000 respondents over the past 75 years in the US, I undertake the most comprehensive test of gender differences in issue attention and show that such differences are much stronger than previously thought and invariant across time. Second, utilizing the European Election Study surveys conducted in 12 European countries (N=13,549), 94 nationally representative surveys conducted between 1960 and 2015 in the US (N=110,796), and original datasets of legislative speeches from Turkey, I test the argument that women differ from men in the scope of societal issues with which they are involved and find strong empirical evidence for it. Results show that women do indeed attend to a broader range of issues when asked about the most important problems facing their country and speak about a wider range of issues in legislatures, a finding that is insensitive to various alternative model specifications and robustness tests.Includes bibliographical reference

Electoral Systems and Gender Inequality in Political News: Analyzing the News Visibility of Members of Parliament in Norway and the UK

Research continues to find gender inequality in politics and political communication, but our understanding of the variation in the degree of bias across systems is limited. A recent meta-analysis reveals how, in countries with proportional representation (PR), the media pay considerably more attention to men politicians. In plurality systems, this bias is absent. The present study proposes a new explanation for this finding, emphasizing how the size of electoral districts moderates both the demand for and supply of women politicians in news reporting. Analyzing more than 600,000 news appearances made by Norwegian and British MPs from 2000 to 2016, we produce a detailed picture of gender biases in news visibility that speaks in favor of single-member districts in plurality systems. Although PR is generally recognized as advantageous for the political representation of women, our findings call for a more nuanced understanding of the link between electoral systems and gender equality.publishedVersio

An Integrated Optimization Framework for Multi-Component Predictive Analytics in Wind Farm Operations & Maintenance

Recent years have seen an unprecedented growth in the use of sensor data to guide wind farm operations and maintenance. Emerging sensor-driven approaches typically focus on optimal maintenance procedures for single turbine systems, or model multiple turbines in wind farms as single component entities. In reality, turbines are composed of multiple components that dynamically interact throughout their lifetime. These interactions are central for realistic assessment and control of turbine failure risks. In this paper, an integrated framework that combines i) real-time degradation models used for predicting remaining life distribution of each component, with ii) mixed integer optimization models and solution algorithms used for identifying optimal wind farm maintenance and operations is proposed. Maintenance decisions identify optimal times to repair every component, which in turn, determine the failure risk of the turbines. More specifically, optimization models that characterize a turbine's failure time as the first time that one of its constituent components fail - a systems reliability concept called competing risk is developed. The resulting turbine failures impact the optimization of wind farm operations and revenue. Extensive experiments conducted for multiple wind farms with 300 wind turbines - 1200 components - showcases the performance of the proposed framework over conventional methods

Income inequality and opinion expression gap in the American public: an analysis of policy priorities

Past scholarship has documented that the poor are more likely to withhold their policy preferences in public opinion surveys, suggesting income gaps in political engagement. Despite the wealth of scholarly interest in opinion formation, however, previous studies focused almost exclusively on opinion gaps in preferences, leaving income-related gaps in policy prioritisation virtually unexamined. Drawing on 596 public opinion surveys conducted with nearly 700,000 Americans over 55 years, we make a comprehensive attempt to examine income-level differences in “don’t know” responses to the most important problem (MIP) question. Our results show that the less affluent are more likely to say “don’t know” when asked about the MIP facing their country, even after controlling for various factors including educational attainment and political attention. Importantly, we also show that income-related differences in opinionation cross cut other socio-economic differences in policy prioritisation. These results have important implications for the study of public opinion.publishedVersio

Perceptions of gendered-challenges in academia: How women academics see gender hierarchies as barriers to achievement

Despite the egalitarian and collegial philosophy in its ideals, academic market is segregated and gendered where women receive fewer rewards than their male counterparts, are under-represented, segregated and excluded from participation in the formal and informal academic structures in academia. The country contexts, the gendered academic organizational settings as well as everyday interactions all play a major role not only in women's participation within academia, but also how they perceive their future in academic institutions. This research note, through an original survey with over 200 academics, attempts to study the latter assumption by looking at women academics' perceptions of their work life, their challenges, as well as aspirations. Our results show that those perceiving strong hierarchy in the realm of work are significantly more likely to believe that being woman in academia harms their job prospects. We also show that, not only were they pessimistic about the challenges facing them at the moment, but they were also more skeptical about women's potential in overcoming such challenges in the future.publishedVersio