Welcome │ اهلا │ Salut Link to heading

I am a Second-Year Ph.D. student in Politics at Princeton University. My research lies at the intersection of authoritarian & democratic politics, immigration, and religion, with a regional focus on North Africa and the Mediterranean. I combine archival research, historical data, and computational text analysis to study how regimes construct legitimacy and manage political opposition.

Publications Link to heading

Mapping (A)Ideology: A Taxonomy of European Parties Using Generative LLMs as Zero-Shot Learners
(with Riccardo Di Leo, Chen Zeng, and Elias Dinas). Political Analysis.

[Abstract]

We perform the first mapping of the ideological positions of European parties using generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a “zero-shot” learner. We ask OpenAI’s Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3.5 (GPT-3.5) to identify the more “right-wing” option across all possible duplets of European parties at a given point in time, solely based on their names and country of origin, and combine this information via a Bradley–Terry model to create an ideological ranking. A cross-validation employing widely-used expert-, manifesto- and poll-based estimates reveals that the ideological scores produced by Large Language Models (LLMs) closely map those obtained through the expert-based evaluation, i.e., CHES. Given the high cost of scaling parties via trained coders, and the scarcity of expert data before the 1990s, our finding that generative AI produces estimates of comparable quality to CHES supports its usage in political science on the grounds of replicability, agility, and affordability.

Working Papers Link to heading

  • The Political Economy of Fatwas
    Religious authority and economic crisis in authoritarian Egypt.

  • Libyan Jews Between Empire and Revolution: Colonial Rule, Expulsion, and Authoritarian State-Building

Work in Progress Link to heading

  • The Long Shadow of April 7th: Televised Public Executions and the Consolidation of Authoritarian Rule in Libya

  • Where’s the Party? (Wtih Kevin Koehler)

  • Immigration and Electoral Politics: Evidence from the Paris 2024 Olympics
    (with Mathias Poertner and Melissa Sands).

Contact Link to heading

Email: reda.tamtam@princeton.edu