Kadir Cihan Duran was awarded the Virginia Gray Graduate Student Research Award from the Political Organizations and Parties section of the APSA. This award honors distinguished scholar of American politics and mentor of many graduate students, Dr. Virginia Gray, Professor Emerita at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The award is for graduate student members of the Political Organizations and Parties who are presenting research at the American Political Science Association Annual Conference.
Kadir Cihan Duran is a Dual-Title Ph.D. student in Political Science and Social Data Analytics at Penn State University. He holds both a Bachelor and a Master of Arts in Political Science and International Relations from Bogazici University, Turkey. His research interests include authoritarian regimes, social media, and quantitative research methods, with a specific focus on network analysis and natural language processing. His works have been published in the New Media & Society and Politics, Groups, and Identities.
His thesis examines how incumbent and opposition actors strategically deploy misinformation on digital platforms. The research investigates the dynamic where pro-incumbent actors, who possess superior resources and control traditional media, infiltrate opposition-dominated online spaces like YouTube to disrupt their mobilization efforts. Using a mix of network analysis and machine learning, he hypothesizes that this infiltration is asymmetric, with incumbents infiltrating opposition spaces more than the reverse, and that these misinformation surges force opposition groups into reactive strategies like debunking false claims.
He was awarded the Virginia Gray Graduate Student Research Award for his study on the effects of pre-election coalitions on voter behavior. His research addresses how political parties navigate complex coalitional politics in multi-party systems and the subsequent repercussions for their electoral base and identity. Furthermore, the paper contributes directly to the literature on partisanship and electoral behavior by demonstrating how elite-level maneuvers, such as coalition formation, can reshape voter motivations.
Congratulations Cihan!
