Ozan Aksoy
Biographic Data
| ID | 86022 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ozan Aksoy |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ozan |
| FAMILY NAME | Aksoy |
| SIGNATURE | AKSOY O |
| AFFILIATIONS | University College London |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2170-6099 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 89 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Standards in sociology: A position statement at the 25 th anniversary of the European Academy of Sociology
This article is temporarily under embargo
Making Sense of Honor Killings
Honor killings, which occur when women are perceived to have broken purity norms and bring "dishonor" to their family, pose profound moral and societal problems and underrecognized sociological puzzles. Given the immense cost, why do families murder their own daughter, niece, or cousin? Conversely, given the tragic consequences, why are norms broken in the first place? Drawing on accounts of honor killings, we characterize the key actors, actions…
Social support and mental well-being among people with and without chronic illness during the Covid-19 pandemic: Evidence from the longitudinal UCL covid survey
The large mental well-being gap between people with and without chronic illness persisted during the pandemic. However, social support and provision can partially narrow this gap, hence should be employed in future pandemic management
The impact of religious involvement on trust, volunteering, and perceived cooperativeness: Evidence from two British panels
Does religious involvement make people more trusting and prosocial? Considering conflicting theories and mixed prior evidence, we subject this question to a stringent test using large-scale, representative data from the British Household Panel Survey (1991-2009, N ≈ 26,000) and the UK Household Longitudinal Study (2009-2021, N ≈ 80,000). We employ cross-lagged panel models with individual fixed effects to account for time-invariant confounders an…
The impact of partisanship and religiosity on conspiracy‐theory beliefs in Turkey
Why do people believe in conspiracy theories? This paper responds to this ever‐significant question by scrutinizing people's belief in conspiracy theories in Turkey. Building on Max Weber's theory of rationalization, it proposes that value‐laden and instrumentally rational predispositions, namely religiosity and partisanship, predict people's beliefs in conspiracy theories. This current study tests this hypothesis by analyzing two nationwide surv…
A Model of Dynamic Flows: Explaining Turkey’s Interprovincial Migration
The flow of resources across nodes over time (e.g., migration, financial transfers, peer-to-peer interactions) is a common phenomenon in sociology. Standard statistical methods are inadequate to model such interdependent flows. We propose a hierarchical Dirichlet-multinomial regression model and a Bayesian estimation method. We apply the model to analyze 25,632,876 migration instances that took place between Turkey’s 81 provinces from 2009 to 201…
Preaching to Social Media: Turkey's Friday Khutbas and Their Effects on Twitter
The author analyzes through unsupervised machine learning the content of all Friday khutbas (sermons) read to millions of citizens in thousands of mosques in Turkey between 2015 and 2021. The author focuses on six nonreligious and recurrent topics that feature in the sermons, namely, business, family, nationalism, health, trust, and patience. The author demonstrates that the content of the sermons responds strongly to events of national and polit…
Within-family influences on compliance with social-distancing measures during Covid-19 lockdowns in the United Kingdom
Commitment through Sacrifice: How Longer Ramadan Fasting Strengthens Religiosity and Political Islam
Religions seem to defy the law-of-demand, which suggests that all else equal, an increase in the cost of an activity will induce individuals to decrease the resources they spend on that activity. Rather than weakening religious organizations, evidence shows that the sacrifices exacted by religious practices are positively associated with the success of those organizations. We present the first strong evidence that this association is neither spur…
Does Herding Undermine the Trust Enhancing Effect of Reputation? An Empirical Investigation with Online-Auction Data
In today’s online markets, the reputation mechanism undergoes its most successful propagation in human history. Online reputation systems substitute informal sanctioning mechanisms at work in close-knit groups and enable complete strangers to trade with each other across large geographic distances. The organizational features of online markets support actors in solving three problems that hamper mutually beneficial market exchange: the value, com…
The Politics behind the Veil
Using a natural experiment, we find that in provinces where Turkey's Islamic Justice and Development Party (AKP) just won the election in 2004, women, including those who are weakly religious or non-religious, now veil far more than in provinces in which AKP just lost, the more so the poorer they are. This effect, as we predict, does not occur for praying regularly which is more costly and harder to observe practice. We argue that veiling is high…
Call and Response: SEM President’s Roundtable 2016, “Ethnomusicological Responses to the Contemporary Dynamics of Migrants and Refugees
The privilege of organizing the SEM President’s Roundtable in 2016 and 2017 provided an opportunity to call attention to a topic that has concerned my teaching and research since graduate school. For the first iteration of “Ethnomusicological Responses to the Contemporary Dynamics of Migrants and Refugees” I convened a panel of people whose perspectives I admire. I wanted to learn from them, and I did. As someone who has been involved with Middle…
Music and migration among the Alevi immigrants from Turkey in Germany
There is a sizable Alevi religious minority among the predominantly Sunni Muslim immigrant community from Turkey in Germany. Based on dissertation research among Alevis between 2010 and 2013, this article investigates the experiences of Alevis, currently living in Germany, who trace their background to locations within the boundaries of the Turkish nation. Music has been a particularly important mode through which Alevis in Germany have articulat…
Crosscutting circles in a social dilemma: Effects of social identity and inequality on cooperation
Political Islam, Marriage, and Fertility: Evidence from a Natural Experiment
The plethora of pathways leading to family formation decisions has made the causal assessment of the influence of politics and religion on marriage and fertility difficult. The authors exploit the unique opportunity offered by the emergence of a new political party in Turkey, and the electoral features of the country’s majoritarian system, to estimate the effect of politics and religion on marriage and fertility. The AK Parti (Justice and Develop…
The Sung Home: Narrative, Morality, and the Kurdish Nation
In recent years, there has been a growing interest among scholars in Kurdish politics and society. Books about the politics of the Kurdish uprisings and conflicts in the countries where Kurds live, namely Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, focus on political debates and issues regarding the Kurdish people and their relationships with their neighbors. Wendelmoet Hamelink's The Sung Home: Narrative, Morality, and the Kurdish Nation is a refreshing ethn…
Motherhood, Sex of the Offspring, and Religious Signaling
Using Turkey’s 2013 Demographic and Health Survey, I find that among married women, having a single child as opposed to no children is associated with an approximately five-percentage-point increase in the likelihood of religious veiling. Furthermore, the likelihood of religious veiling increases as the number of a woman’s children increases. Robustness checks show that these associations are rather stable across the Muslim world. In addition, I …
Cumulative advantage in collective action groups: How competition for group members alters the provision of public goods
Regression Discontinuity diagnostics reveal statistical anomalies in Turkish elections
Behind the Veil: The Strategic Use of Religious Garb
There is anecdotal evidence that since the late 20th century young, educated, and urban Muslim women veil more frequently and strictly. Does this imply that the classical sociological theories of religion, which predict that modernization should cause a decrease in religious behaviours, do not apply to Islam? We investigate this question using structural equation modelling to analyse three datasets, one from Turkey, one covering 25 Muslim countri…
Effects of Heterogeneity and Homophily on Cooperation
The article provides a micro-behavioral model and an experimental design to understand the effect of heterogeneity in social identities on cooperation while accounting for endogenous sorting. Social identity is induced exogenously using the minimal group paradigm. The experiment manipulates sorting with three treatments: having subjects interact with both in- and outgroup members, giving them the choice to interact either with ingroup or outgroup…
Testing Game-Theoretic Comparative Statics Using Bayesian Model Selection
Aksoy and Weesie (2013 Aksoy, O., & Weesie, J. (2013). Social motives and expectations in one-shot asymmetric Prisoner's Dilemmas. Journal of Mathematical Sociology, 37, 24–58.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) propose a formal-game-theoretic model that yields comparative statics predictions about the behavior of actors and actors’ expectations about behaviors of others in nonrepeated Prisoner's Dilemma games. They …
Hierarchical Bayesian analysis of outcome- and process-based social preferences and beliefs in Dictator Games and sequential Prisoner's Dilemmas
Social Motives and Expectations in One-Shot Asymmetric Prisoner's Dilemmas
We propose a formal-behavioral framework with 3 components: nonselfish motives, expectations about others' nonselfish motives, and a game-theoretic component. For nonselfish motives, 3 nonstandard utility models representing altruism, inequality aversion, and norms are considered. Expectations are modeled as certain versus uncertain expectations. The game-theoretic component predicts behavior of actors and actors' expectations about behaviors of …
Beliefs about the social orientations of others: A parametric test of the triangle, false consensus, and cone hypotheses
Political Islam, Marriage, and Fertility: Evidence from a Natural Experiment
The plethora of pathways leading to family formation decisions has made the causal assessment of the influence of politics and religion on marriage and fertility difficult. The authors exploit the unique opportunity offered by the emergence of a new political party in Turkey, and the electoral features of the country’s majoritarian system, to estimate the effect of politics and religion on marriage and fertility. The AK Parti (Justice and Develop…
Inequality and Procedural Justice in Social Dilemmas
This study investigates the influence of resource inequality and the fairness of the allocation procedure of unequal resources on cooperative behavior in social dilemmas. We propose a simple formal behavioral model that incorporates conflicting selfish and social motivations. This model allows us to predict how inequality influences cooperative behavior. Allocation of resources is manipulated by three treatments that vary in terms of procedural j…
The Politics behind the Veil
Using a natural experiment, we find that in provinces where Turkey's Islamic Justice and Development Party (AKP) just won the election in 2004, women, including those who are weakly religious or non-religious, now veil far more than in provinces in which AKP just lost, the more so the poorer they are. This effect, as we predict, does not occur for praying regularly which is more costly and harder to observe practice. We argue that veiling is high…
Commitment through Sacrifice: How Longer Ramadan Fasting Strengthens Religiosity and Political Islam
Religions seem to defy the law-of-demand, which suggests that all else equal, an increase in the cost of an activity will induce individuals to decrease the resources they spend on that activity. Rather than weakening religious organizations, evidence shows that the sacrifices exacted by religious practices are positively associated with the success of those organizations. We present the first strong evidence that this association is neither spur…
Behind the Veil: The Strategic Use of Religious Garb
There is anecdotal evidence that since the late 20th century young, educated, and urban Muslim women veil more frequently and strictly. Does this imply that the classical sociological theories of religion, which predict that modernization should cause a decrease in religious behaviours, do not apply to Islam? We investigate this question using structural equation modelling to analyse three datasets, one from Turkey, one covering 25 Muslim countri…
Call and Response: SEM President’s Roundtable 2016, “Ethnomusicological Responses to the Contemporary Dynamics of Migrants and Refugees
The privilege of organizing the SEM President’s Roundtable in 2016 and 2017 provided an opportunity to call attention to a topic that has concerned my teaching and research since graduate school. For the first iteration of “Ethnomusicological Responses to the Contemporary Dynamics of Migrants and Refugees” I convened a panel of people whose perspectives I admire. I wanted to learn from them, and I did. As someone who has been involved with Middle…
Beliefs about the social orientations of others: A parametric test of the triangle, false consensus, and cone hypotheses
Making Sense of Honor Killings
Honor killings, which occur when women are perceived to have broken purity norms and bring "dishonor" to their family, pose profound moral and societal problems and underrecognized sociological puzzles. Given the immense cost, why do families murder their own daughter, niece, or cousin? Conversely, given the tragic consequences, why are norms broken in the first place? Drawing on accounts of honor killings, we characterize the key actors, actions…
The impact of partisanship and religiosity on conspiracy‐theory beliefs in Turkey
Why do people believe in conspiracy theories? This paper responds to this ever‐significant question by scrutinizing people's belief in conspiracy theories in Turkey. Building on Max Weber's theory of rationalization, it proposes that value‐laden and instrumentally rational predispositions, namely religiosity and partisanship, predict people's beliefs in conspiracy theories. This current study tests this hypothesis by analyzing two nationwide surv…
Crosscutting circles in a social dilemma: Effects of social identity and inequality on cooperation
Effects of Heterogeneity and Homophily on Cooperation
The article provides a micro-behavioral model and an experimental design to understand the effect of heterogeneity in social identities on cooperation while accounting for endogenous sorting. Social identity is induced exogenously using the minimal group paradigm. The experiment manipulates sorting with three treatments: having subjects interact with both in- and outgroup members, giving them the choice to interact either with ingroup or outgroup…
Social Motives and Expectations in One-Shot Asymmetric Prisoner's Dilemmas
We propose a formal-behavioral framework with 3 components: nonselfish motives, expectations about others' nonselfish motives, and a game-theoretic component. For nonselfish motives, 3 nonstandard utility models representing altruism, inequality aversion, and norms are considered. Expectations are modeled as certain versus uncertain expectations. The game-theoretic component predicts behavior of actors and actors' expectations about behaviors of …
A Model of Dynamic Flows: Explaining Turkey’s Interprovincial Migration
The flow of resources across nodes over time (e.g., migration, financial transfers, peer-to-peer interactions) is a common phenomenon in sociology. Standard statistical methods are inadequate to model such interdependent flows. We propose a hierarchical Dirichlet-multinomial regression model and a Bayesian estimation method. We apply the model to analyze 25,632,876 migration instances that took place between Turkey’s 81 provinces from 2009 to 201…
Cumulative advantage in collective action groups: How competition for group members alters the provision of public goods
Regression Discontinuity diagnostics reveal statistical anomalies in Turkish elections
Hierarchical Bayesian analysis of outcome- and process-based social preferences and beliefs in Dictator Games and sequential Prisoner's Dilemmas
Music and migration among the Alevi immigrants from Turkey in Germany
There is a sizable Alevi religious minority among the predominantly Sunni Muslim immigrant community from Turkey in Germany. Based on dissertation research among Alevis between 2010 and 2013, this article investigates the experiences of Alevis, currently living in Germany, who trace their background to locations within the boundaries of the Turkish nation. Music has been a particularly important mode through which Alevis in Germany have articulat…
Motherhood, Sex of the Offspring, and Religious Signaling
Using Turkey’s 2013 Demographic and Health Survey, I find that among married women, having a single child as opposed to no children is associated with an approximately five-percentage-point increase in the likelihood of religious veiling. Furthermore, the likelihood of religious veiling increases as the number of a woman’s children increases. Robustness checks show that these associations are rather stable across the Muslim world. In addition, I …
The impact of religious involvement on trust, volunteering, and perceived cooperativeness: Evidence from two British panels
Does religious involvement make people more trusting and prosocial? Considering conflicting theories and mixed prior evidence, we subject this question to a stringent test using large-scale, representative data from the British Household Panel Survey (1991-2009, N ≈ 26,000) and the UK Household Longitudinal Study (2009-2021, N ≈ 80,000). We employ cross-lagged panel models with individual fixed effects to account for time-invariant confounders an…
Preaching to Social Media: Turkey's Friday Khutbas and Their Effects on Twitter
The author analyzes through unsupervised machine learning the content of all Friday khutbas (sermons) read to millions of citizens in thousands of mosques in Turkey between 2015 and 2021. The author focuses on six nonreligious and recurrent topics that feature in the sermons, namely, business, family, nationalism, health, trust, and patience. The author demonstrates that the content of the sermons responds strongly to events of national and polit…
Inequality and Procedural Justice in Social Dilemmas
This study investigates the influence of resource inequality and the fairness of the allocation procedure of unequal resources on cooperative behavior in social dilemmas. We propose a simple formal behavioral model that incorporates conflicting selfish and social motivations. This model allows us to predict how inequality influences cooperative behavior. Allocation of resources is manipulated by three treatments that vary in terms of procedural j…
Beliefs about the social orientations of others: A parametric test of the triangle, false consensus, and cone hypotheses
Social Motives and Expectations in One-Shot Asymmetric Prisoner's Dilemmas
We propose a formal-behavioral framework with 3 components: nonselfish motives, expectations about others' nonselfish motives, and a game-theoretic component. For nonselfish motives, 3 nonstandard utility models representing altruism, inequality aversion, and norms are considered. Expectations are modeled as certain versus uncertain expectations. The game-theoretic component predicts behavior of actors and actors' expectations about behaviors of …
Hierarchical Bayesian analysis of outcome- and process-based social preferences and beliefs in Dictator Games and sequential Prisoner's Dilemmas
Effects of Heterogeneity and Homophily on Cooperation
The article provides a micro-behavioral model and an experimental design to understand the effect of heterogeneity in social identities on cooperation while accounting for endogenous sorting. Social identity is induced exogenously using the minimal group paradigm. The experiment manipulates sorting with three treatments: having subjects interact with both in- and outgroup members, giving them the choice to interact either with ingroup or outgroup…
Testing Game-Theoretic Comparative Statics Using Bayesian Model Selection
Aksoy and Weesie (2013 Aksoy, O., & Weesie, J. (2013). Social motives and expectations in one-shot asymmetric Prisoner's Dilemmas. Journal of Mathematical Sociology, 37, 24–58.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) propose a formal-game-theoretic model that yields comparative statics predictions about the behavior of actors and actors’ expectations about behaviors of others in nonrepeated Prisoner's Dilemma games. They …
Regression Discontinuity diagnostics reveal statistical anomalies in Turkish elections
Behind the Veil: The Strategic Use of Religious Garb
There is anecdotal evidence that since the late 20th century young, educated, and urban Muslim women veil more frequently and strictly. Does this imply that the classical sociological theories of religion, which predict that modernization should cause a decrease in religious behaviours, do not apply to Islam? We investigate this question using structural equation modelling to analyse three datasets, one from Turkey, one covering 25 Muslim countri…
The Sung Home: Narrative, Morality, and the Kurdish Nation
In recent years, there has been a growing interest among scholars in Kurdish politics and society. Books about the politics of the Kurdish uprisings and conflicts in the countries where Kurds live, namely Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, focus on political debates and issues regarding the Kurdish people and their relationships with their neighbors. Wendelmoet Hamelink's The Sung Home: Narrative, Morality, and the Kurdish Nation is a refreshing ethn…
Motherhood, Sex of the Offspring, and Religious Signaling
Using Turkey’s 2013 Demographic and Health Survey, I find that among married women, having a single child as opposed to no children is associated with an approximately five-percentage-point increase in the likelihood of religious veiling. Furthermore, the likelihood of religious veiling increases as the number of a woman’s children increases. Robustness checks show that these associations are rather stable across the Muslim world. In addition, I …
Cumulative advantage in collective action groups: How competition for group members alters the provision of public goods
Political Islam, Marriage, and Fertility: Evidence from a Natural Experiment
The plethora of pathways leading to family formation decisions has made the causal assessment of the influence of politics and religion on marriage and fertility difficult. The authors exploit the unique opportunity offered by the emergence of a new political party in Turkey, and the electoral features of the country’s majoritarian system, to estimate the effect of politics and religion on marriage and fertility. The AK Parti (Justice and Develop…
Call and Response: SEM President’s Roundtable 2016, “Ethnomusicological Responses to the Contemporary Dynamics of Migrants and Refugees
The privilege of organizing the SEM President’s Roundtable in 2016 and 2017 provided an opportunity to call attention to a topic that has concerned my teaching and research since graduate school. For the first iteration of “Ethnomusicological Responses to the Contemporary Dynamics of Migrants and Refugees” I convened a panel of people whose perspectives I admire. I wanted to learn from them, and I did. As someone who has been involved with Middle…
Music and migration among the Alevi immigrants from Turkey in Germany
There is a sizable Alevi religious minority among the predominantly Sunni Muslim immigrant community from Turkey in Germany. Based on dissertation research among Alevis between 2010 and 2013, this article investigates the experiences of Alevis, currently living in Germany, who trace their background to locations within the boundaries of the Turkish nation. Music has been a particularly important mode through which Alevis in Germany have articulat…
Crosscutting circles in a social dilemma: Effects of social identity and inequality on cooperation
Does Herding Undermine the Trust Enhancing Effect of Reputation? An Empirical Investigation with Online-Auction Data
In today’s online markets, the reputation mechanism undergoes its most successful propagation in human history. Online reputation systems substitute informal sanctioning mechanisms at work in close-knit groups and enable complete strangers to trade with each other across large geographic distances. The organizational features of online markets support actors in solving three problems that hamper mutually beneficial market exchange: the value, com…
The Politics behind the Veil
Using a natural experiment, we find that in provinces where Turkey's Islamic Justice and Development Party (AKP) just won the election in 2004, women, including those who are weakly religious or non-religious, now veil far more than in provinces in which AKP just lost, the more so the poorer they are. This effect, as we predict, does not occur for praying regularly which is more costly and harder to observe practice. We argue that veiling is high…
Within-family influences on compliance with social-distancing measures during Covid-19 lockdowns in the United Kingdom
Commitment through Sacrifice: How Longer Ramadan Fasting Strengthens Religiosity and Political Islam
Religions seem to defy the law-of-demand, which suggests that all else equal, an increase in the cost of an activity will induce individuals to decrease the resources they spend on that activity. Rather than weakening religious organizations, evidence shows that the sacrifices exacted by religious practices are positively associated with the success of those organizations. We present the first strong evidence that this association is neither spur…
The impact of partisanship and religiosity on conspiracy‐theory beliefs in Turkey
Why do people believe in conspiracy theories? This paper responds to this ever‐significant question by scrutinizing people's belief in conspiracy theories in Turkey. Building on Max Weber's theory of rationalization, it proposes that value‐laden and instrumentally rational predispositions, namely religiosity and partisanship, predict people's beliefs in conspiracy theories. This current study tests this hypothesis by analyzing two nationwide surv…
A Model of Dynamic Flows: Explaining Turkey’s Interprovincial Migration
The flow of resources across nodes over time (e.g., migration, financial transfers, peer-to-peer interactions) is a common phenomenon in sociology. Standard statistical methods are inadequate to model such interdependent flows. We propose a hierarchical Dirichlet-multinomial regression model and a Bayesian estimation method. We apply the model to analyze 25,632,876 migration instances that took place between Turkey’s 81 provinces from 2009 to 201…
Preaching to Social Media: Turkey's Friday Khutbas and Their Effects on Twitter
The author analyzes through unsupervised machine learning the content of all Friday khutbas (sermons) read to millions of citizens in thousands of mosques in Turkey between 2015 and 2021. The author focuses on six nonreligious and recurrent topics that feature in the sermons, namely, business, family, nationalism, health, trust, and patience. The author demonstrates that the content of the sermons responds strongly to events of national and polit…
Social support and mental well-being among people with and without chronic illness during the Covid-19 pandemic: Evidence from the longitudinal UCL covid survey
The large mental well-being gap between people with and without chronic illness persisted during the pandemic. However, social support and provision can partially narrow this gap, hence should be employed in future pandemic management
The impact of religious involvement on trust, volunteering, and perceived cooperativeness: Evidence from two British panels
Does religious involvement make people more trusting and prosocial? Considering conflicting theories and mixed prior evidence, we subject this question to a stringent test using large-scale, representative data from the British Household Panel Survey (1991-2009, N ≈ 26,000) and the UK Household Longitudinal Study (2009-2021, N ≈ 80,000). We employ cross-lagged panel models with individual fixed effects to account for time-invariant confounders an…
Making Sense of Honor Killings
Honor killings, which occur when women are perceived to have broken purity norms and bring "dishonor" to their family, pose profound moral and societal problems and underrecognized sociological puzzles. Given the immense cost, why do families murder their own daughter, niece, or cousin? Conversely, given the tragic consequences, why are norms broken in the first place? Drawing on accounts of honor killings, we characterize the key actors, actions…
Psychology (17 works) · Social Psychology (15 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Economics (13 works) · Political science (12 works) · Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies (9 works) · Social Psychology (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Culture, Economy, and Development Studies (7 works) · Microeconomics (7 works)