Mehmet works on the role of ideology in authoritarian regimes in his dissertation, where he is trying to understand whether authoritarian regimes' use of ideological claims as a communication tool makes them more stable and popular. His dissertation research employs several techniques, such as expert surveys, text-as-data approaches, and econometric tools. His broader research interests include authoritarian regimes, illiberalism, quantitative text analysis , quantitative methods in political science, and causal inference in observational studies. He is currently working on publishing his dissertation papers as journal articles.
Besides his dissertation, Mehmet works for the Horizon Europe Project AUTHLIB - Neo-Authoritarianism in Europe and the Liberal Democratic Response where he contributes as a text analysis expert and is working on producing two papers on measuring illiberalism using text-as-data. Over the last few years, he has been involved in many research projects as an external collaborator or research assistant in institutions like the International Labor Organization and the University of Vienna. Mehmet gets employed as a teaching assistant at the Department of Political Science and the Department of Undergraduate Studies at CEU. He is the co-recipient of the Outstanding Teaching Assistant award of the Department of Political Science both in 2022 and 2023. In Fall 2023, he taught the MA level "Math Refresher" and "Remedial Political Science" courses as the main instructor.
