Introduction
Erdem Yörük is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Koç University and an Associate Member in the Department of Social Policy and Intervention at University of Oxford. He serves as the principal investigator of the ERC-funded project “Emerging Welfare” (The New Politics of Welfare: Towards an “Emerging Markets” Welfare State Regime) (emw.ku.edu.tr) and the H2020 project Social Comquant (socialcomquant.ku.edu.tr).
Expert
Erdem Yörük serves as a member of Young Academy of Europe and an associate editor of European Review. His work focuses on social welfare and social policy, social movements, political sociology, and computational social sciences. His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), Ford Foundation, FP7 Marie Curie CIG, European Research Council StG, ERC PoC, H2020, and the Science Academy of Turkey. His projects have created two datasets on welfare (glow.ku.edu.tr) and protest movements (glocon.ku.edu.tr). His articles have appeared in World Development, Governance, Politics & Society, Journal of European Social Policy, New Left Review, Current Sociology, South Atlantic Quarterly, American Behavioral Scientist, International Journal of Communication, Social Policy and Administration, and Social Indicators Research, among others. His book, "The Politics of the Welfare State in Turkey" was published by the University of Michigan Press in May 2022.
Most recently, Dr. Yörük has received an ERC Proof of Concept grant for his project Politus. The Politus Project will assess the commercial viability of proprietary natural language processing and machine learning technology for AI-based data-driven fair social policymaking. The project will verify the innovation potential of computational social science and policy-related novel methods from Dr. Yörük's ERC-funded Emerging WelfareProject (https://emw.ku.edu.tr).To deliver the technical and commercial proof of concept, Dr. Yörük will establish the Politus Analytics Company, which will offer an AI-based data platform and fair data-driven policymaking consultancy services to two main client personas - political parties and municipalities. The Politus Project will address two interconnected problems of opposition political parties and municipalities in Turkey and other emerging markets regarding social policy making: (1) populist governments gain political advantage by abusing public social policies with the aid of big data, which disables opposition parties and municipalities to develop competitive electoral strategies (2) These big data sources are not available to non-governmental stakeholders, including opposition parties and municipalities, indicating a government-led information gap which opposition parties and municipalities cannot fill with traditional survey polling methods. The Politus project will develop an AI-based innovation that combines quantitative and computational methods in order to create a data platform that delivers representative, valid, instant, real-time, multi-country and multi-language panel data on key political and social trends, which will be used to design fair social policies for opposition parties and municipalities. Politus will serve its clients (municipalities and political parties) (i) the data and tools to pinpoint exact discretionary and clientelistic allocation of social policies (ii) data and insight to understand the needs and wants of the citizens and gain electoral advantage and (iii) the design of fair social policies.
Fields of expertise: Evidence for policy / knowledge valorization, Inclusive social development / inclusive societies / social inclusion, Monitoring and evaluation, Participation, Policy design and delivery, Reduction of inequalities / equity / poverty eradication, Social change / social transformations, Social innovation / public sector innovation / policy innovation, Social policy, Social protection