Research

I am a computational social scientist with a substantive focus on elite political networks. Political elites are people who influence political outcomes in a country. Networks of political elites are formed through relationships among these actors: kinship, co-religion, support and consultation, co-attendance at a school, and so on. My dissertation is about the empirical and theoretical study of such networks.

Empirically, I am interested in the use of digital data sources and their application to the study of political elites. In a paper from my dissertation, I use Wikidata as a source of data for the study of kinship ties among people in positions of power in countries around the globe. Wikidata is the only source of data to my knowledge that has machine readable data on politicians, military officials, businesspeople, clergy, etc. with many layers of ties among them, including kinship ties, for almost all countries in the world. I find that kinship ties in authoritarian countries are denser than those in democratic countries.

Below, you can find a list of my papers and working papers that have a citable copy on the internet.

Papers

  1. Köksal, Abdullatif, Omer Faruk Yalcin, Ahmet Akbiyik, M. Tahir Kilavuz, Anna Korhonen, and Hinrich Schütze. 2023. “Language-Agnostic Bias Detection in Language Models.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.13302.

  2. Yalcin, Omer F. 2022. “Empirical Study of Elite Networks with Wikidata.” OSF Preprints. September 29. doi:10.31219/osf.io/yrfvs.

  3. Kim, Sangyeon, Omer F. Yalcin, Samuel E. Bestvater, Kevin Munger, Burt L. Monroe, and Bruce A. Desmarais. “The Effects of an Informational Intervention on Attention to Anti-Vaccination Content on YouTube.” In Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, vol. 14, pp. 949-953. 2020.