Can Mutlu

I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Political Economy and Government program at Harvard University. I use formal theory and quantitative methods to study contemporary electoral politics and historical elite behavior, especially, in the Western European and the U.S. context.

I am also part of a group of researchers committed to digitizing Cast Vote Record data in the United States. In a set of papers, we use these data to test common place assumptions and hypothesis on voter behavior. These include the nationalization of American local politics, different ideological and partisan voter groups’ responsiveness to race level valence cues, voter rationale for abstention, and the validity of commonplace assumptions over voters’ political utility functions aiming to capture voting and abstention behavior of the voter.

I am currently a Graduate Fellow at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) and the Center for American Political Studies (CAPS). I am also a Graduate Student Affiliate at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies and the recipient of a Krupp Foundation Dissertation Research Fellowship.

Prior to Harvard, I earned an M.Sc. in political economy and political science from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and a B.Sc. in Mathematics and Economics from Haverford College.

My research is published in Nature Scientific Data and the American Political Sceince Review.