Gülşen Doğan is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Political Science and International Relations
at Koc University. Her research interests lie in the intersection of comparative politics, populism
and democracy. In addition to her academic studies, she is also working in think tanks. She
worked as a non-resident research assistant in Turkey program at the Middle East Institute (MEI),
a Washington D.C.-based think-tank during the summer term in 2022. Currently, she is also
working as a project researcher at MiReKoç (Migration Research Center at Koç University) for the
BROAD-ER project (Bridging the Migration and Urban Studies Nexus). It is a Horizon Europe
Twinning project, funded by the European Union in partnership with GRITIM-Pompeu Fabra
University (Barcelona, Spain) and Universiteit van Amsterdam (Netherlands). At IstanPol, she also
takes part in the projects of the Human and Social Development Program and works as a
researcher and editor. Her works in collaboration with her interdisciplinary team members aim
to transform the research to policy recommendations and create feasible political agenda in
Turkey. She primarily worked on two research reports published by IstanPol and Friedrich Ebert
Stiftung and co-authored by respectively Dr. Bengi Ruken Cengiz and Gülçin Karabağ, and Seren
Selvin Korkmaz and Alphan Telek: “Women’s Political Participation in Turkey: Obstacles and
Experiences” and “The Precarity of Youth in Turkey: Perceptions of Work, Subsistence and Life”.
The first research examines the obstacles and experiences of women politicians in Turkey. The
research is based on in-depth interviews with politicians who have served or are working at
different levels of political parties. As a result, the obstacles are grouped as structural,
institutional, and cultural and we made policy recommendations for empowering women in the
political arena of Turkey. The second research is based on focus group interviews with young
people in Turkey grouped according to their education and employment status. It aims to
measure the perceptions and expectations of young people about their livelihood conditions and
the contemporary politics and questions whether they form a class identity called “precariat”.