Berk Filcan

I am a Ph.D. student in the Department of Government at The University of Texas at Austin. My research sits at the intersection of electoral behavior, political communication, and quantitative methods, with an empirical focus that spans European politics and the Turkish political context.

Methodologically, I work primarily with survey experiments, causal inference, and text analysis to study how political communication shapes voter attitudes and behavior.

My dissertation examines whether negative campaigning persuades voters beyond simply mobilizing them, proposing a cognitive mechanism I call the “affective tipping point.” A related chapter looks at the legitimacy of far-right parties.

In addition to my dissertation research, I have worked on projects applying machine learning methods – including double machine learning and causal forests – to panel survey data, studying how the effects of campaign contact are moderated by partisan media consumption.

At UT Austin, I teach and assist with GOV 324L, a course on Western European party systems.

Feel free to look through my CV and publications for more detail, or reach out if you’d like to be in touch.