Daniel KselmanDaniel Kselman

Daniel Kselman (PhD, Duke University) joins the Institute for the fall semester to develop his dissertation on democratic governance and consolidation in Turkey into a book manuscript. His project, “Electoral Institutions, Intra-party Competition, and Political Conflict,” uses game theory to analyze the consequences of proportional representation (PR) for intra-party as well as inter-party competition. He also looks at how democratization affects the likelihood of political conflict, and in particular at the role of democratic elections in Turkey’s cyclical political unrest. The work is based on ten months of research in Turkey as well as cross-national data sets.

Kselman plans to extend his analysis in a separate paper on the politics of authoritarian regimes where elections, although not perfectly free and fair, permit some competitiveness and representation. He will also continue to work on a massive Duke/World Bank data set project designed to quantify mechanisms of democratic accountability in a sample of over 80 countries.