Welcome │ اهلا │ Salut Link to heading

I am a Third-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

  • Spectacular Repression, Electrification, and the Deterrence of Mobilization in Libya

  • Crisis Governance and Minority Repression: Antisemitism in the Kingdom of Libya, 1951–1969

Work in Progress Link to heading

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

  • The Political Economy of Fatwas: Religious Rulings and Economic Crises in Authoritarian Egypt

  • Libyan Jews Between Empire and Revolution: Italian Colonialism, Jewish Libyans, and Gaddafi’s Expulsions

  • Measuring our Neighbors: The EU’s Politics of Inclusion and MENA Public Opinion

Contact Link to heading

Email: reda.tamtam@princeton.edu

If you are considering applying to Ph.D. programs in political science and would like to talk about the process, feel free to reach out — I’m especially happy to hear from prospective applicants from underrepresented groups.