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Populism, Ideology and Discourse in the Global South

Didem Seyis

Contact: seyisd(at)ceu.edu

Post-doctoral Researcher, CEU Democracy Institute

Didem Seyis is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Central European University Democracy Institute and a Visiting Researcher at the Binghamton University (SUNY) Center on Democratic Performance. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Binghamton University. Her research focuses on democratic backsliding, populism, identity politics, and voting behavior in Latin America and Europe.

She has two primary academic goals: understanding why populists are still popular among voters and how populist governments undermine democratic institutions. She collected election data on 18 Latin American countries. Her work appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as ​Nature, Political Studies, Electoral Studies, Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy, Frontiers in Political Science, and Turkish Studies.

​Previously, she was a researcher at the Johns Hopkins University, exploring the media-based strategies of populist leaders to shape Ingroup and Outgroup identities, and a lab member of the COVID-19 Protective Policy Index (PPI) Project at Binghamton University.

Research project

Planting the Seeds of Populism at Democratic Transition: Exclusion and the Rise of Populism to Power

Populism is on the rise all over the world. While populist parties and candidates are increasingly popular globally, populism is in government only in some countries. Why is populism in government in some countries, although it is often in opposition elsewhere? This research project concentrates on the exclusion of some social groups during the democratic transition from authoritarian regimes to explain the rise of populism. In this proposal, I argue that countries, where some social groups are systematically excluded from accessing social, political, and economic power are more likely to experience populism in government. More specifically, social groups excluded by the established democratic system are predisposed to support anti-establishment populist parties. Hence, populists are more likely to have large vote shares in elections and become incumbents in countries with high exclusion. To explore this issue, I plan to follow a mixed-method approach and combine a large-N statistical analysis with process tracing and focus group research on Turkey, Poland, and Bolivia.