Mert Moral

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Assistant) at Sabancı University

Prevalent models of issue voting view vote choice as a choice among party policies. Choice sets are implicitly assumed to be the same for all voters, and their composition is left to researchers' discretion. This article aims to relax such assumptions by presenting a model with a varying probability of inclusion in the choice set. We apply the “con...

Despite the growing literature on polarization, students of comparative politics have not yet been able to reach much assured understanding of how party polarization influences voter turnout in multiparty settings, which often put on offer both centrist, and divergent mainstream and niche party policies. I evaluate how politically sophisticated and...

Invalid votes are often considered as simple failure to cast a valid vote. In fact, they might be a rational expression of discontent with party policy offerings. By employing individual and party system-level data on eighteen European party systems, this article focuses on voter discontent and voter apathy as two major determinants of casting an i...

Popülist söylem ve siyasetin birçok demokrasi ve demokratikleşmekte olan ülkede son yıllardaki hızlı yükselişine talep temelli açıklamalar getiren geçmiş yazın, seçmenlerin popülist tutumları ile popülist parti ve liderlere destekleri arasında pozitif bir örüntü olduğunu ortaya koymaktadır. Öte yandan, popülizmin farklı tanımlarında kendine yer bul...

Election polls are not only essential to measure electorates' political attitudes, preferences, and behavior but may also influence their formation. In this study, we evaluate election polls in Turkey, which have been increasingly popular and criticized by political actors in the last years, from a survey methodology perspective and investigate whe...

Interactive models have been increasingly used in social science research to assess conditional theoretical expectations and hypotheses empirically. However, the direct, indirect, and marginal effects of the constitutive terms in interactive linear and non-linear models are often erroneously calculated and interpreted. This study examines the conte...

In recent decades, political science literature has experienced significant growth in the popularity of nonlinear models with multiplicative interaction terms. When one or more constitutive variables are not binary, most studies report the marginal effect of the variable of interest at its sample mean while allowing the other constitutive variable/...

Do party policy offerings simply reflect public opinion or do parties shape public demand for policies? Theories of party position-taking and the operation of democracy expect parties to track their supporters’ positions, while scholarship of public opinion has shown voters often adopt the position of their preferred parties. We apply both of these...

Examining justice-level determinants of party dissolution decisions can reveal how high Courts may influence the public choice by constraining the representation of political ideologies. We argue that Constitutional Court justices strategically engage in politics through party dissolution cases, and justices ‘en garde’ act to guard the regime again...

This paper investigates the effects of the media promotion of the Turkish Voter Advice Application website (www.oypusulasi.org) during the 2011 Turkish Parliamentary elections. The research design combines data on the dates and medium used for the promotion of the VAA with statistical data on the number of connections received, the recommendations...