Can Mutlu

I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Political Economy and Government program at Harvard University. My primary research fields are Political Economy, Comparative Politics, and American Politics. My teaching experience and interests are in political economy, formal theory and game theory.

I am on the 2026–27 academic job market and my job market paper is On the Rationale for Abstention: Partial Punishment Without Ticket Splitting.

In my research, I use empirical methods and formal theory to study voter, candidate, and party behavior, and how electoral institutions shape these behaviors. I am also a founding member of the Americans Vote project, a group of researchers digitizing and standardizing Cast Vote Record data in the United States. My research has been published in Nature Scientific Data and the American Political Science Review.

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

Prior to my Ph.D., I earned an M.Sc. in Political Science and Political Economy from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and a B.Sc. in Economics and Mathematics from Haverford College.

Contact: cmutlu@g.harvard.edu

PUBLICATIONS

Conevska, Aleksandra, and Can Mutlu. Forthcoming. When Do Voters Stop Caring? Estimating the Shape of Voters’ Utility Functions. American Political Science Review.

Conevska, A., Hirano, S., Kuriwaki, S., Lewis, J. B., Mutlu, C., Snyder, J. M. (2026). How Partisan are U.S. Local Elections? Evidence from 2020 Cast Vote Records. American Political Science Review.

Kuriwaki, S., Reece, M., Baltz, S., Conevska, A., Loffredo, J. R., Mutlu, C., Samarth, T., Acevedo Jetter, K. E., Djanogly Garai, Z., Murray, K., Hirano, S., Lewis, J. B., Snyder, J. M., Jr., and Stewart, C., III (2024). Cast vote records: A database of ballots from the 2020 U.S. Election. Nature Scientific Data, 11, 1304.

WORKING PAPERS

On the Rationale for Abstention: Partial Punishment Without Ticket Splitting. Job Market Paper.

Ideology, Party, and Split-Ticket Voting (with Aleksandra Conevska, Shigeo Hirano, and James M. Snyder, Jr.). American Political Science Review. Revise and Resubmit.

When to Unite, to Divide and Rule?. Journal of Theoretical Politics. Revise and Resubmit.

WORK IN PROGRESS

Voting under Different Rules: How Electoral Institutions Shape Partisan and Ideological Voting (with Aleksandra Conevska, Shigeo Hirano, and James Snyder)

Beyond Party and Ideology: Issue Voting in Down-Ballot Elections (with Aleksandra Conevska, Shigeo Hirano, and James Snyder)

The Political Geography of Ideology and Partisanship: Measuring Local Political Space from Cast Vote Records (with Aleksandra Conevska, Shigeo Hirano, and James Snyder)

Voter Fatigue or Office Type (with James Snyder)

Who Stands Where on Climate (with Aleksandra Conevska)

When Are Parties ‘Good’ For The Environment? (with Aleksandra Conevska)

OTHER WORK

Mutlu, C., Atalan, Y., Jensen, B. (2024). When to Reveal Military Capabilities? SSRN Electronic Journal.

Jensen, B., Atalan, Y., Mutlu, C., Macias III, J. M. (2024). Competition in the shadow of technology. Center for Strategic and International Studies.

TEACHING

HARVARD UNIVERSITY

Econ 2020b: Microeconomic Theory II, Teaching Fellow, Spring 2024

Gov 2005: Formal Political Theory, Teaching Fellow, Fall 2023

Gov 2006: Formal Models of Domestic Politics, Teaching Fellow, Spring 2023, (Awarded Certificate of Distinction in Teaching)

Gov 2005: Formal Political Theory, Teaching Fellow, Fall 2022, (Awarded Certificate of Distinction in Teaching)

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