The Politics of Welfare in Emerging Markets: A Talk by Dr. Erdem Yörük

The Department of International Relations cordially invites you a talk by Dr. Erdem Yoruk from Koc University.

Dr. Yoruk will be presenting his ongoing ERC (European Research Council) project. 

The talk will take place in AB2 no 345 during 14:30-16:00 on Friday, May 10.

"The Politics of Welfare in Emerging Markets"

In this seminar, Erdem Yörük will talk about his ongoing ERC (European Research Council) project. Dr. Yörük’s project, titled “The New Politics of Welfare: Towards an Emerging Markets Welfare State Regime” (emw.ku.edu.tr), compares China, Brazil, India, Mexico, South Africa, and Turkey to test two hypotheses: (i) emerging market economies are forming a new welfare state typology that differs from the ones in the global north (ii) the new welfare regime emerges principally as a response to the growing political power of the poor as a dual source of threat and support for governments. The project team builds a comparative welfare indicators database and comparative protest events database on emerging markets, using local news sources and computational linguistic methods based on artificial intelligence - machine learning and natural language processing. As such, the project develops several large-N, comparative and case analyses to test the aforementioned hypotheses. Erdem Yörük’s seminar will consist of three parts: After a short introduction about the project with its general objectives and methods, he will present the first paper which contains the results of a large-N global panel data analysis. This paper illustrates that global social assistance coverage has a significant positive relationship with riots as a form of violent civil unrest, supporting the argument that policy-makers expand social assistance as a means of containing the political threat. In the second paper on India, Erdem Yörük examines the contentious political determinants of the largest workfare program in the world, the Indian NREGA and argues that India has used the widespread workfare program NREGA as a counter-insurgency strategy against Maoist violent contentions. Using a district-level variation of violent incidents, the paper shows that higher intensity of violent conflicts leads to higher NREGA benefits. These two papers challenge the contemporary literature on anti-poverty programs, which remains dominated by structuralist arguments and underestimates the effect of contentious political factors.

Erdem Yörük (PhD, Johns Hopkins University, 2012) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Koç University, Istanbul and an associate member of the Department of Social Policy and Intervention at University of Oxford. His work focuses on social welfare and social policy, social movements, political sociology, and comparative and historical sociology. He has publications in international journals such as New Left Review, Governance, Politics & Society, South Atlantic Quarterly, Current Sociology, Social Indicators Research, World Development,and International Journal of Communication.He is currently preparing his book manuscript, titled “The Politics of the Welfare State in Turkey,” for the University of Michigan Press.Dr. Yörük has been awarded several competitive research grants, including an ERC-Starting Grant and a Marie Curie CIG grant from the European Commission, BAGEP from Science Academy of Turkey, NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant, and the Ford Foundation MERC Dissertation Grant. He is an associate editor of the SSCI journal European Review.