welcome!

HELLO!

My name is Yunus Emre Orhan. I am an Assistant Professor in the Politics and Public Affairs Department at Denison University. Previously, I was an NSF-funded Postdoctoral Fellow at Digital Society Project. I received my Ph.D. in political science from UW Milwaukee Political Science Department. 

I am a comparative political scientist studying democratic accountability, political behavior, and governance. My research examines how polarization, identity conflict, and elite strategies shape electoral behavior and the resilience of democratic institutions, and increasingly asks how the development and use of artificial intelligence may transform these relationships. A growing part of my work focuses on comparative AI governance: how democracies translate competing commitments to innovation, accountability, rights, participation, and state capacity into institutions and enforceable rules. 

My research has appeared in Democratization, Ethnopolitics, and Computation, and my public writing has appeared in The Washington Post. My work has also been discussed in outlets including The Atlantic and POTUS Radio's The Trendline. 

My teaching connects comparative politics, international relations, and public policy through questions about democracy, political behavior, technology, and governance. I emphasize experiential and research-based learning: students analyze comparative data, build measures of difficult political concepts, participate in policy simulations, and apply political science to real-world institutional problems. My current courses include comparative policymaking, global governance, and AI Governance in democracies. 

I am currently developing the AI Governance Index (AI-Gov), a comparative research project examining how countries govern artificial intelligence. The project also serves as a platform for undergraduate research, allowing students to participate in the process of conceptualizing, measuring, and comparing emerging forms of governance.

I am a team member of the Connect Elicit Learn Lab. With James F. Adams, I organize the Polarization Consortium workshops and a yearly mini-conference during the MPSA meeting on the Politics of Polarization.

Outside of work, you’ll usually find me reading, inventing games with my daughter, camping with my family and friends, or deep in conversation during a good hike.