Identifying the Diffusion and Suppression of Political Naming in Turkey with a Matched Interrupted Time Series Design
Published in Working paper, 2026
What can a child’s name reveal about political life under authoritarian rule? Naming brings together family attachments, cultural preferences and identities that extend beyond the household. A name can also acquire a recognizable political association while retaining these other meanings. This paper examines that possibility through Deniz, the Turkish word for “sea” and the name of revolutionary activist Deniz Gezmiş, to investigate how political identification and repression may shape naming practices.
Drawing on more than 28 million Turkish birth records from 1960 to 1990, I develop a comparative approach to studying nationwide political shocks when no geographic population offers an obvious unaffected benchmark. The approach combines a panel interrupted time-series design, which examines departures from projected naming trends, with comparisons among names sharing similar cultural origins and earlier trajectories. Together, these comparisons assess political interpretations against broader changes in naming fashions, while examining variation across political environments.
The paper connects authoritarian politics with a methodological question: what can administrative records reveal about political expression when they record behavior but leave individual intentions unobserved? It examines the possibilities and limits of learning from naming patterns whose cultural meanings and political associations can overlap.
Read the paper below, or open it in a new tab.
This paper is my independent methodological contribution to a doctoral dissertation. The underlying data collection and the broader substantive project on naming and political resistance are joint work with Asli Cansunar, Can Bodrumlu, and Nela Mrchkovska.
Poster
A one-page visual summary of the paper’s design and main findings.