TÜBA-GEBİP Award to our faculty members Mert Moral and M. Oğuz Afacan

Sabancı University Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Faculty Members Mert Moral and Mustafa Oğuz Afacan are granted the 2020 TUBA (Turkish Academy of Sciences) Outstanding Young Scientists Award. The TÜBA-GEBİP award is given annually by the Academy.

The TÜBA-GEBİP Awards have been presented since 2001 to award and encourage the outstanding achievements of young scientists, to foster the continuation of their scientific studies in Turkey, the foundation of their own working groups, and the implementation of Turkish based international level, high quality projects and the resulting publications in the fields of nature, engineering, health sciences and social sciences. Within the scope of the program, besides the financial support of 20 thousand liras each year to the award winners for 3 years, an additional support of 6 thousand liras each year for doctoral students at the dissertation stage and consultancy by the academy members are also provided. Moreover, TÜBA-GEBİP Award winners become members of TÜBA Young Academy. 

 “The Effects of Political Polarization on Turnout and Voting Behavior in Turkey” (Mert Moral)

Mert Moral’s project aims to collect a novel and comprehensive dataset on the outcomes of the presidential, general, and municipality elections at the neighborhood (village) level. Employing this novel and comprehensive dataset, the empirical analyses aim to test the hypotheses that high and increasing party, electoral, and geographical polarization decreases vote transitions and increases voter turnout in the long run.

In addition to its contributions to the Turkish political literature in these respects, by being the first study investigating the long-term behavioral effects of political polarization on electoral behavior and proposing a number of methodological innovations, the proposed project aims to contribute to the literatures on political polarization and electoral behavior.

“ An Alternative Financing System to Improve University Placements” (Mustafa Oğuz Afacan)

In some countries, including big ones such as Turkey, China, and Brazil, university placements are ruled by a centralized institution. By soliciting students’ preferences over university programs, these institutions determine university placements by using an algorithm. In today’s practice, each student bears the tuition burden at her placement. However, in a country like Turkey, where finance institutions do not have the practice to provide a credit for tuition burdens, that hard constraint yields avoidable efficiency losses. In other words, students can be placed at their more preferred programs while universities’ tuition requests are all cleared.

In his project, Mustafa Oğuz Afacan will design an algorithm that will place students at their more preferred programs to those under today’s algorithm (efficiency increase) by means of tuition transfers. At this algorithm’s placements, students gain, and at the same time, universities can clear all their tuition requests. As students are more successful in their more preferred programs, the project’s findings are expected to contribute to the increase of education quality.

We congratulate our faculty members who won the 2020 TÜBA GEBİP Awards on their success.