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, autocratization, 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, he is working on two papers on electoral coalitions in authoritarian regimes. Over the last 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 also 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 (2022).
