Research Interests

Ongoing research

Choosing who to foot the bill: Distributional Politics of Green Energy Transition in Germany and the UK*

In contrast to conventional public policies, subsidizing renewables often circumvents the state budget, as its costs are directly passed on to the bills of electricity consumers. In this way, the government effectively builds up a de facto fiscal space that it can use to fund renewables without sapping its fiscal space, which is largely dependent on tax revenues and hence subject to stricter scrutiny by democratic mechanisms. So far, such consumer-funded policies have been the backbone of financing renewable energy sources in Europe: Relying on the de facto fiscal space generated by these policies, a substantive deal of subsidies has been granted to renewable energy sectors to facilitate the green energy transition since the early 1990s. The politics of funding the energy transition by directly transferring the cost to customers is not simple and less complex, however, even though its usage and exploitation seem relatively convenient. As the costs of energy transition rise over time, consumer groups tend to oppose distributional outcomes. At this point, two questions motivate this research: How do governments handle the conflictual politics of consumer-funded policies in their energy transitions? And why do cross-case differences occur? By leveraging a comparison between Germany and the UK, this article attempts to answer these questions. It contends that when distributional opposition surges, governments use different strategies to achieve political acceptability of energy transition and secure its long-term funding via consumer-funded policies. These strategies consist of economization, redistribution, and compensation. Typically, governments employ distributive strategies in varied combinations and intensities. This research also addresses these cross-case disparities by investigating several dynamics, including electoral incentives, distribution of political power, partisanship, privileged access to policy making, and the availability of alternative fiscal resources.

*presented at MPSA 2022, CES 2022, APSA 2022

“New Politics” of Green Energy Transition: Evidence from Europe  

Subsidies given to renewable energy technologies are a critical component of energy transition. Since the early 1990s, a substantive deal of subsidies has been granted to renewable energy sectors to facilitate the green energy transition in Europe. Subsidies, on the other hand, are usually given only temporarily: Once the market for new renewable technologies matures and becomes competitive, the government should gradually roll back subsidies. As the cost of installations decreases over time, there should be a corresponding and timely reduction in subsidy levels. At least, this is what established state aid rules in European countries suggest. In reality, however, it is not always quite easy to achieve such optimal conditions in a subsidy regime: Policy makers often struggle to orchestrate their attempts to reduce subsidies with real-time market conditions. Most importantly, decision-making processes are plagued by the pursuit of particularistic interests, with private interests triumphing over public interests: Once given, it often gets difficult to take back economic privileges like subsidies due to opposition and vested interests in the burgeoning renewable energy sectors. In this research, I aim to test this argument by using a large-N dataset on renewable subsidy levels in OECD countries. To further specify causal pathways in my argument, I also aim to utilize a nested analysis based on case studies from Germany, the United Kingdom and Denmark. In these case studies, I intend to investigate specific episodes for degression in renewable subsidies in which the government ended up doing less degression in subsidies than it had originally planned because of the influence of political veto players and resistance from renewable energy producers.

*to be presented at APSA 2023

Integrating Qualitative-Methods in Social Science Inquiry*

Although burgeoning studies on qualitative research methods have been quite helpful in demonstrating the diversity of such methodological tools, not much has been written to map out these tools' differential functions in the entire research process and explain how they can complement each other. From hypothesis testing to measurement and conceptualization, research process consists of different stages. In most stages, qualitative research methods usually share a lot, but there are also stages in which qualitative methods can offer different functionalities like generalization and causal identification as well as data collection. First, we offer anaccount of these differences. Second, to offer a practical guideline, we explain how researchers can bring together qualitative methods in a complementary way to satisfy the requirements of modern social science inquiry. More specifically, we explain how qualitative tools can be utilized most effectively at each researchstep and how each qualitative tool can be combined with others throughout entire research process. Particularly in data generation, causal identification and generalization, we have a considerable maneuvering space to form optimal combinations of qualitative tools that can best serve the needs of our research. By drawing on an original data set which documents how various qualitative tools are employed in various academic outlets, our research aims to identify best practices, spot prevalent shortcomings, and offer possible solutions.

*with Mehmet Yegin; to be presented at MPSA 2023, APSA 2023; this research receives support from Center for Innovation in Social Science at Boston University,

Publications