OSMAN SABRI KIRATLI, PhD

Some examples of my recently published or forthcoming works:

Public Attitudes on Cooperation

Populism and Public Attitudes toward International Organizations: Voting, Communication, and Education

What effect does populism have on public attitudes toward International Organizations (IOs)? In this article recently published in The Review of International Organizations, we differentiate between populist communication – understood as IO criticism in line with populist core ideas – and populist voting as political behavior among citizens. We argue, first, that populist voters – that is, citizens voting for a populist party – are more critical of IOs. Second, IO-critical communication based on the democratic deficit of global governance and the loss of national sovereignty that populist parties often adopt have a substantially damaging impact on public IO attitudes. Third, we propose that the negative effect of IO-critical communication should be stronger among populist voters, and, fourth, considerably vary among groups of different educational levels.

To test our theoretical expectations, we first turn to World Values Survey data (7th wave) and demonstrate that populist voters are significantly more skeptical of IOs than non-populist voters, while the effect of populist voting is strongest for more educated citizens. Second, we use a preregistered survey experiment to explore the effect of IO-critical communication on IO favorability and determine if populist voting and educational levels moderate these communication effects. Our findings reveal that IO-critical communication substantially decreases confidence in IOs. Populist and non-populist voters do not differ in their susceptibility, yet IO-critical communication exerts its greatest effects among the higher educated.

When to not Respond in Kind? Individuals' Expectations of the Future and Support for Reciprocity in Foreign Policy

This paper, published in Political Behavior, investigates if individuals' negative assessments of the future drive micro-level reluctance for international cooperation and reciprocal behavior, a core principle of multilateralism. To test our theoretical expectations, we field online survey experiments on a sample of over 3,000 respondents in the US and Turkey in October-November 2020. The experimental results show that on average, individuals are fairly sensitive to target countries' policy actions and are inclined to reciprocate when contemplating whether to increase contributions to UN or consent to bilateral trade liberalization. Yet, further analyses concur that individual inclinations to reciprocate are substantially moderated by their future expectations. Specifically, individuals who are more pessimistic about their material prospects remain fairly indifferent to the positive actions of other countries, but are more likely to penalize negative foreign policy actions by reciprocating in kind.

Social Media Effects on Public Trust in the EU

This paper, published in Public Opinion Quarterly, scrutinizes the effect of social media use on institutional trust in the European Union (EU) among European citizens. Fixed-effects regression models on data from the Eurobarometer survey conducted in 2019, the year of the most recent European Parliament (EP) elections, demonstrate that higher social media use is associated with lower trust in the EU. More importantly, social media usage habits exert particularly detrimental effects in regions with wider and faster internet connections. In such high-information environments, those who more frequently use online social networks, tend to trust those networks, and receive information on EU affairs from these networks have less faith in the EU compared to those in regions with lower-quality internet access. In contrast, in regions with lower broadband access, receiving EU information from social media fosters political trust.

Public Attitudes on Conflict

Policy Objective of Military Intervention and Public Attitudes: A Conjoint Experiment from US and Turkey

This paper, recently published in Political Behavior, scrutinizes the role of the principal policy objective of military intervention in conditioning citizen attitudes for the use of force. Extending the scope of analysis beyond the independent effects, it next assesses how the effects of two core variables of intervention, namely international organizations' approval of the operation and the regime type of the target country, vary for interventions with differing mandates. The results of the conjoint experiment in two dissimilar cases, the US and Turkey, show that despite substantial changes in relative support for different types of operations, policy objective is still a highly potent determinant of individual attitudes. The results also concur that compared to foreign policy restraint and humanitarian missions, individuals are more sensitive to international organizations' endorsements of the use of force for peace and internal political change operations. Finally, individuals are significantly disapproving of operations that seek internal political changes in democratic targets, though in contrast to the democratic peace theory, for other types of interventions, they are indifferent to the regime type of the opponent.

Outside of my academic life, I am an enthusiastic music listener (electronica, jazz, nu-jazz, indie), and hi-fi junkie (always in the hunt for some marginal improvements in sound). I also play board games, with my personal favorites being Gloomhaven, Robinson Crusoe, Wingspan, Beyond the Sun, and Ark Nova.