I am a PhD student in the Department of Political Science at the University of California San Diego.
I study comparative politics and the political economy of development, with a regional focus on Turkey, MENA, and Southeastern Europe. My current research examines how governments build electoral support through distributive programs, including social assistance, subsidized public services, and credit. I also work on the historical political economy of state building in the late Ottoman Empire. My empirical work centers on causal inference, combining quasi-experimental designs for observational data, experimental methods, and geospatial analysis, alongside LLM-based archival data extraction. I am also developing a specialization in formal theory.
Education
Ph.D., Political Science, University of California, San Diego, 2025–present
M.A., Political Science and International Relations, Boğaziçi University, 2024
B.A., Economics, and B.A., Political Science and International Relations, Boğaziçi University, 2020
Contact
ceeser@ucsd.edu
Department of Political Science, University of California, San Diego