EKREM KARAKOÇ

I am a Professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Binghamton, SUNY. My primary field is Comparative Politics with a focus on comparative political economy and democratization. My recent research interest has been minorities in the Middle East. My work has appeared in a number of academic journals, including World Politics, Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Politics and Religion, Party Politics, Electoral Studies, European Political Science Reviews and several others.

My dissertation was awarded the 2011 Juan Linz Prize for Best Dissertation by the Comparative Democratization section of the American Political Science Association (APSA). My book, published by Oxford University Press on October 2018, Inequality after the Transition sought to understand the causes of inequality in post-communist countries and other new democracies in Europe. This book challenges the inequality-democracy literature and argue that new democracies are not able to reduce income inequality and offer some explanations of why this is so. Using large-N analysis and paired case studies on post-Communist and Southern European countries, it emphasizes the weakness of the party system and its impact on inequality through social spending, which is novel in the literature. In addition, new data on party-system institutionalization and social spending also constitute contributions to the political science literature.