Research Interests
Regime Change, Competitive Authoritarian Regimes, Populism & Extremism, Comparative Political Behavior & Attitudes, Political Polarization, Opposition Campaigns in Hybrid Regimes, Authoritarian Media Control, Identity-building through Media.
Regime Change, Competitive Authoritarian Regimes, Populism & Extremism, Comparative Political Behavior & Attitudes, Political Polarization, Opposition Campaigns in Hybrid Regimes, Authoritarian Media Control, Identity-building through Media.
Publications
We have developed and made accessible for multidisciplinary audience a unique global dataset of the behavior of political actors during the COVID-19 pandemic as measured by their policy-making efforts to protect their publics. The dataset presents consistently coded cross-national data at subnational and national levels on the daily level of stringency of public health policies by level of government overall and within specific policy categories, and reports branches of government that adopted these policies. The data on these public mandates of protective behaviors is collected from media announcements and government publications. The dataset allows comparisons of governments’ policy efforts and timing across the world and can serve as a source of information on policy determinants of pandemic outcomes -- both societal and possibly medical.
How well have populist leaders responded to the COVID-19 pandemic? There is a growing literature dedicated to populism and health outcomes. However, the ongoing pandemic provides us with a unique opportunity to study whether populist leaders fared better or worse than their non-populist counterparts by using a much larger sample size. While there has been a fruitful debate over whether populism is responsible for worse health outcomes, much of the focus has centered around the overall effect of having populist parties in power, without testing for different explanatory mechanisms. We argue that populist leaders fuel mass political polarization, which increases the overall level of hostility among the population and reduces their willingness to comply with anti-COVID measures and, more generally, contribute to public good. We test this theory using the expert-coded V-Party Dataset which contains variables for the ideological characteristics for parties around the world, as well as weekly excess mortality from the World Mortality Dataset. In addition to the OLS regression analysis, we employ a causal mediation framework to account for the order of succession of populism and political polarization. Our empirical results corroborate our main hypothesis that populism fuels political polarization, which is, in turn, associated with higher excess mortality during the ongoing pandemic. Our results are robust to alternative model specifications.
Right-wing populism has been gaining traction over the past two decades. Once relatively minor players in democratic politics, populist parties today mobilize millions of voters and garner unprecedented electoral support with their antiimmigrant discourse. But what has changed to make populists so much stronger now than in the last century? Explanations in the literature tend to focus either on economic concerns or the cultural threat posed by immigrants with distinct languages and traditions. This paper examines these explanations from the literature and builds on them to argue that perceptions of economic and cultural threats feed off each other, and increasingly so with increased immigration from less culturally similar regions. We begin with the assumption that voter sentiment toward non-natives runs the gamut from strongly negative to positive, with more voters being willing to support right-wing populists at the polls in line with increases in perceived economic concerns and fears that immigration will dilute or drown out native culture. When these combine — when increased flows of culturally distant immigrants coincide with economic hard times — voters who normally would support mainstream parties and tolerate immigration are more likely to turn to populists. We test arguments from the literature and our interactive hypothesis using data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES).
The degree of ideological congruence between citizens and their elected representatives is an important feature of democratic systems of government. A long tradition of literature has examined the ideological linkages between citizens and governments, often drawing attention to the differences (or lack thereof) in congruence across different types of electoral systems. Previous research has largely relied on aggregate-level measures of ideological congruence, such as the ideological distance between the position of the median voter and the government. We turn our attention here to how congruence relationships are perceived by individual voters, and how the perceptions of congruence may vary across electoral system types. This individual-level measure of ideological congruence is important in that individual-level, rather than aggregate-level, congruence has been shown to influence other outcomes such as citizen satisfaction with democratic performance. We expect electoral “winners” – those who voted for a party that entered government – to perceive greater ideological congruence between themselves and the government compared to electoral “losers”. We expect this effect to be stronger in majoritarian systems where political competition takes place primarily between two parties, than in proportional systems where electoral losers are more likely to receive a proportional share of representation. We test these expectations by estimating random-effects regressions of perceived individual-level congruence using data from 54 elections held in 23 democracies included in the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES). The results provide consistent support for our expectations. Electoral winners in all types of electoral systems perceive greater ideological congruence between themselves and the government, and this effect is stronger in majoritarian systems.
- Andrew Bennett, and Didem Seyis. (2023). "The Online Market’s Invisible Hand: Internet Media and Rising Populism". In Press at Political Studies.
- Olga Shvetsova, Andrei Zhirnov, Abdul Basit Adeel, Mert Can Bayar, Onsel Gurel Bayrali, Michael Catalano, Olivia Catalano, Hyoungrohk Chu, Frank Giannelli, Ezgi Muftuoglu, Dina Rosenberg, Didem Seyis, Bradley Skopyk, Julie VanDusky-Allen, Tianyi Zhao (2022). "Protective Policy Index (PPI): Global Dataset of Institutional Origins and Relative Stringency of COVID 19 Mitigation Policies". Forthcoming in Nature.
We have developed and made accessible for multidisciplinary audience a unique global dataset of the behavior of political actors during the COVID-19 pandemic as measured by their policy-making efforts to protect their publics. The dataset presents consistently coded cross-national data at subnational and national levels on the daily level of stringency of public health policies by level of government overall and within specific policy categories, and reports branches of government that adopted these policies. The data on these public mandates of protective behaviors is collected from media announcements and government publications. The dataset allows comparisons of governments’ policy efforts and timing across the world and can serve as a source of information on policy determinants of pandemic outcomes -- both societal and possibly medical.
- Timur Naushirvanov, Dina Rosenberg, Patrick Sawyer, and Didem Seyis (2022). "How Populists Fueled Polarization and Failed Their Response to Covid-19: An Empirical Analysis". Forthcoming in Frontiers in Political Science.
How well have populist leaders responded to the COVID-19 pandemic? There is a growing literature dedicated to populism and health outcomes. However, the ongoing pandemic provides us with a unique opportunity to study whether populist leaders fared better or worse than their non-populist counterparts by using a much larger sample size. While there has been a fruitful debate over whether populism is responsible for worse health outcomes, much of the focus has centered around the overall effect of having populist parties in power, without testing for different explanatory mechanisms. We argue that populist leaders fuel mass political polarization, which increases the overall level of hostility among the population and reduces their willingness to comply with anti-COVID measures and, more generally, contribute to public good. We test this theory using the expert-coded V-Party Dataset which contains variables for the ideological characteristics for parties around the world, as well as weekly excess mortality from the World Mortality Dataset. In addition to the OLS regression analysis, we employ a causal mediation framework to account for the order of succession of populism and political polarization. Our empirical results corroborate our main hypothesis that populism fuels political polarization, which is, in turn, associated with higher excess mortality during the ongoing pandemic. Our results are robust to alternative model specifications.
- Didem Seyis and William B. Heller (2021). "Voter Support for Anti-Immigrant Populist Parties: The Effect of Economic Pessimism and “Out-Group” Immigration". Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy: Vol. 2: No. 3, pp 429-451.
Right-wing populism has been gaining traction over the past two decades. Once relatively minor players in democratic politics, populist parties today mobilize millions of voters and garner unprecedented electoral support with their antiimmigrant discourse. But what has changed to make populists so much stronger now than in the last century? Explanations in the literature tend to focus either on economic concerns or the cultural threat posed by immigrants with distinct languages and traditions. This paper examines these explanations from the literature and builds on them to argue that perceptions of economic and cultural threats feed off each other, and increasingly so with increased immigration from less culturally similar regions. We begin with the assumption that voter sentiment toward non-natives runs the gamut from strongly negative to positive, with more voters being willing to support right-wing populists at the polls in line with increases in perceived economic concerns and fears that immigration will dilute or drown out native culture. When these combine — when increased flows of culturally distant immigrants coincide with economic hard times — voters who normally would support mainstream parties and tolerate immigration are more likely to turn to populists. We test arguments from the literature and our interactive hypothesis using data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES).
- Robin E. Best, and Didem Seyis. (2021). "How Do Voters Perceive Ideological Congruence? The Effects of Winning and Losing under Different Electoral Rules". Electoral Studies. Volume 69, 102201, ISSN 0261-3794.
The degree of ideological congruence between citizens and their elected representatives is an important feature of democratic systems of government. A long tradition of literature has examined the ideological linkages between citizens and governments, often drawing attention to the differences (or lack thereof) in congruence across different types of electoral systems. Previous research has largely relied on aggregate-level measures of ideological congruence, such as the ideological distance between the position of the median voter and the government. We turn our attention here to how congruence relationships are perceived by individual voters, and how the perceptions of congruence may vary across electoral system types. This individual-level measure of ideological congruence is important in that individual-level, rather than aggregate-level, congruence has been shown to influence other outcomes such as citizen satisfaction with democratic performance. We expect electoral “winners” – those who voted for a party that entered government – to perceive greater ideological congruence between themselves and the government compared to electoral “losers”. We expect this effect to be stronger in majoritarian systems where political competition takes place primarily between two parties, than in proportional systems where electoral losers are more likely to receive a proportional share of representation. We test these expectations by estimating random-effects regressions of perceived individual-level congruence using data from 54 elections held in 23 democracies included in the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES). The results provide consistent support for our expectations. Electoral winners in all types of electoral systems perceive greater ideological congruence between themselves and the government, and this effect is stronger in majoritarian systems.
- Mert Can Bayar, and Didem Seyis. "Populist Responses to COVID-19: The Cases of Turkey and Israel as Examples of Pro-Science Populism and the Cases of the United States and Brazil as Examples of Science-Skeptic Populism". In Government Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic: Between a Rock and a Hard Place, edited by Olga Shvetsova (Forthcoming on October 12, 2023 at Palgrave Macmillan).
- Didem Seyis, and Hayley Munir. "Judiciary Under Attack: Populists in Government and the Independence of the Judiciary in Latin America". In The Ideational Approach to Populism: Consequences and Mitigation, edited by Kirk Hawkins, Eliza Hawkins, Nina Wiesehomeier, Levi Littvay, Angelos Chryssogelos (Forthcoming in 2025 at Routledge Press).
- Didem Seyis. Review of "Nation-Building and Turkish Modernization: Islam, Islamism, and Nationalism in Turkey", edited by Rasim Ozgur Donmez and Ali Yaman. Turkish Studies. 21 No: 5 (2020): 813-815.