EXPERTISE: Opinion dynamics, polarisation, social movements, democratisation and democratic reversal
Başak Taraktaş is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Bogazici University. She received her PhD in political science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2016. Before coming to Bogazici, she worked as a postdoc at Northwestern’s Buffett Institute for Global Affairs for two years and as a research analyst at FutureMap. Her research centers on collective action and opinion dynamics.
Much of her work is set in the contexts of regimes, and contentious politics, where she combines computational methods (such as agent-based models, network analysis, and text analysis) and qualitative research to unpack the effect of ideology and ideational beliefs on cooperation. She is particularly interested in adaptations of complexity theory and dynamical systems in social sciences. Her current project, Dia-Pol, is supported by the Marie Curie Individual Fellowship 2020 grant. Dia-Pol studies the conditions under which polarization follows from social media interactions among social movements and their countermovements and the themes on which these interactions foster dialogue. Her research has been published in reputable journals, including Social Networks, Government and Opposition, Social Movement Studies, Journal of Contemporary European Studies, and PLOS ONE.
RELATED LINKS
● Writings