Rodi Yilmaz

Rodi YILMAZ is a PhD candidate in the Department of Politics and International Studies at SOAS, University of London. His doctoral research investigates the discursive consequences of democratic backsliding in Turkey, examining how institutional centralisation and the transition to a presidential system have transformed parliamentary rhetoric, elite behaviour, and political career trajectories.

 Using the Turkish Grand National Assembly (TBMM) as a case study over the period 2002–2023, his dissertation analyses how the personalisation of executive power under competitive authoritarianism has reshaped MPs’ rhetorical alignment with the leader, intensified discursive polarisation between government and opposition, and established linguistic loyalty as a mechanism of political survival and advancement.  His research employs a mixed-methods quantitative framework that integrates computational text analysis with causal inference techniques. 

Methodologically, the dissertation combines BERT-based semantic embeddings, Top2Vec topic modelling, and dynamic topic models to represent and track shifts in parliamentary discourse over time. His work contributes to the fields of comparative authoritarianism, legislative studies, and computational political science by providing elite-level linguistic evidence of how authoritarian consolidation operates through discursive centralisation. Rodi holds a master’s degree in Social Policy from the University of Birmingham and completed his undergraduate studies in Political Science and International Relations at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. His broader academic interests encompass comparative politics, competitive authoritarianism, political parties, local government, and democratic backsliding.  

He has extensive teaching experience across institutions in both the United Kingdom and Turkey. He currently serves as a Graduate Teaching Assistant at University College London (UCL), where he supports the Democracy and Authoritarianism module by facilitating seminars, providing academic guidance, and undertaking assessment responsibilities. He has previously held teaching positions at Sabancı University and Boğaziçi University, where he contributed to undergraduate instruction in comparative politics, political theory and Turkish politics.  Rodi’s published work includes ‘Can Opposition Win Without Unity in Hybrid Regimes: Rethinking Opposition Victory in Turkey 2024 Local Elections’, published in Government and Opposition (2026). He is also the author of "Ortanın Solu ve Yerel Yönetimler: 1973–1977 İstanbul’da Ahmet İsvan Dönemi" (Scala Yayıncılık, 2023), a book examining local governance during a formative period in Turkish municipal politics. 

In addition, he is involved in co-authored research projects on hybrid regimes, social policy under competitive authoritarianism, and intra-party competition and leadership dynamics.   Rodi is fluent in Turkish and proficient in English, with strong methodological competence in both qualitative and quantitative research, including computational text analysis and natural language processing for political science. At SOAS, he is supervised by Dr Tolga Sinmazdemir, Dr Nathaniel George, and Professor Hagar Kotef.

• Comparative Politics
• Local Governments
• Democratization
• Authoritarianism