Freie Universität Berlin

Graduate Student, BTS - Berlin Graduate School for Transnational Studies

Ph.D candidate

KFG-Kolleg-Forschergruppe

Thesis Title: (Working title) How does Political elite resonance matter for Europeanization? Anti-Corruption and Asylum Policies in Turkey

About

Digdem Soyaltin is a PhD candidate at Berlin Graduate School for Transnational Studies and a research fellow at the Research College on Transformative Power of Europe (KFG). She holds a MSc. degree in European Affairs from Lund University in Sweden, MPhil degree in Political Science from Central European University in Budapest and a B.A in International Relations from Ege University in Turkey. She worked as an intern at the Swedish Institute for European Policy Studies (SIEPS). Her main fields of interests are the EU enlargement policy, Europeanization and domestic change, Good governance, Southeast European and Turkish politics and more  specific  areas  of  fight against corruption and illegal migration. Meanwhile she has temporarily worked in national and international projects and participated to several international academic conferences (EUSA, IPSA, ECPR, UACES)

In her Ph.D project, she studies the variation in form and direction of Europeanization of Justice and Home Affairs policies in Turkey. She focuses on promotion of fight against corruption and illegal migration. In anti-corruption policy, the formal institutional change has mostly remained detached from the behavioural practices. Due to the institutional decoupling, the reform efforts do not have much effect on level of corruption in the country. Yet, in the migration issues, causal pathway of the policy change  has been different . The behavioural adoption has facilitated the formal legal change, and to some extent has been greater than the latter.  The domestic change has been not driven by the external incentives offered by the EU but rather by the domestic agenda of the governmental actors and their political preferences  Or external actors other than the EU, such as the United Nation, the European Convention of Human Rights, the Council of Europe, the US, or transnational actors in Europe have induced the Turkish government to initiate domestic change and introduce EU reforms.

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