Ozan Aksoy
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aksoyundan.bsky.social
Ozan Aksoy
@aksoyundan.bsky.social
870 followers 370 following 140 posts
Professorial Fellow @ Nuffield College & Associate Professor in Sociology @ University of Oxford. PhD Uni Utrecht, BA Bogazici Uni | (Natural) Experimental Methods, Stats, Politics and Religion

https://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/people/profiles/ozan-aksoy/
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aksoyundan.bsky.social
📢 My paper w Aron Szekely on honour-based violence is published online (Open Access): journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10....

We explain this puzzling phenomenon applying game-theory and testing it using large-scale data on norms and actual femicides.

@sriucl.bsky.social @uclsociology.bsky.social
Details of the publication with abstract which reads: Honor killings, which occur when women are perceived to have broken purity norms and bring “dishonor” to their family, pose profound moral and societal problems and underrecognized sociological puzzles. Given the immense cost, why do families murder their own daughter, niece, or cousin? Conversely, given the tragic consequences, why are norms broken in the first place? Drawing on accounts of honor killings, we characterize the key actors, actions, and incentives, and develop two interlinked theoretical models, one on norm-enforcement and another on norm-breaking. The former specifies the conditions under which honor norms should hold, the latter, counterintuitively, predicts that honor killings occur most frequently when honor norms are contested; not when they are strictest. Analyzing data from 24 countries and ~26,000 individuals and building a unique dataset of honor killings from Turkey, we find support for the hypotheses. Honor norms are stronger when laws offer leniency for honor killings, families’ loss of reputation is more consequential, and community cohesion is higher. Actual killings have an inverse-U-shaped link with the prevalence of honor norms. Our work advances the theoretical understanding of honor norms and killings and offers one of the most comprehensive empirical analyses of the factors influencing honor killings. Figure 1 from the paper. Within-Family Interaction and Probabilities of Interaction Outcomes Note: Panel A shows an interaction within a family. Panel B shows the probability of breaking a norm (p2) in the game tree in panel A; the probability of the existence of an honor norm in the repeated norm-enforcement game (p1, i.e., conditions given in Hypotheses 1, 2, and 3 obtain); and the probability of honor killing (p3), which is the product of the former two probabilities, as a function of repeated norm-enforcement game parameters. Figure 3 from the paper. Support for Honor Killings; Coefficients from Multilevel Regressions with Random Intercepts for Countries Data source: PEW (2013) World Muslims Survey. Note: N (response) = 26,458. N (country) = 24. Countries that adopted laws that allow leniency for honor-based violence: Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Niger, Palestinian Territories. Countries that have adultery laws: Afghanistan, Pakistan. Figure 5 from the paper. Results of Poisson Models Predicting the Monthly Number of Honor Killings Note: Predictive margins for the association between support for honor norms and honor killings (top panel) and the average marginal effect of passing law 6284 according to support for honor norms (bottom panel).
April 12, 2025 at 7:13 AM
aksoyundan.bsky.social
But we find no evidence that the policy affected the four target values: democracy, rule of law, tolerance, liberty.

Our study calls for more inclusive civic education programmes for bridging social divisions and fostering positive identities.

[First draft so comments are very welcome]

3/4
January 28, 2025 at 4:04 PM
aksoyundan.bsky.social
Using census + UKHLS survey, 3 diff-in-diffs comparing England after 2020 with Wales/NIR/Scot and UK in 2011 we find evidence consistent with the policy:

(1) Increased British identification for whites and some minorities

(2) Decreased BI for Muslims (for whom BI is already very high)

2/4
January 28, 2025 at 4:04 PM
aksoyundan.bsky.social
📢New preprint alert: osf.io/t7wzv_v1/

@buraksonmez.bsky.social and I've been studying the consequences of the 2014 Fundamental British Values programme launched in schools.

As part of Prevent strategy, the policy aimed to create a shared sense of Britishness through instilling 4 values

🧵

1/4
January 28, 2025 at 4:04 PM
aksoyundan.bsky.social
Here's our abstract.
January 12, 2025 at 8:49 AM
aksoyundan.bsky.social
I refuse to join Bsky; I don't want to help build a gecko chamber
Two geckos making a chamber
November 17, 2024 at 2:26 PM
aksoyundan.bsky.social
UCL is ranked 4th in the UK, 21st globally, ahead of LSE (hihi), in sociology WITHOUT a sociology department! Imagine what if it had (or tells sth about this ranking). @ioe.bsky.social #sociology #ranking #succeedingwithouteventrying
November 13, 2024 at 5:14 PM
aksoyundan.bsky.social
Not sure about the education part or studies, but you should include this somewhere in the slides (hitting as a sociologist):
October 7, 2024 at 5:31 PM
aksoyundan.bsky.social
It is an equilibrium which is not stable for long...
Hodor holding the door
September 27, 2024 at 11:49 AM
aksoyundan.bsky.social
📢 Our experimental sociology workshop starts tomorrow 12:15 UK time. Online & free for all. If you want to join a bit or fully, email to [email protected]

🎁 Tomorrow @ 3:15pm we'll also unveil the "CERN of sociology"-you don't want to miss!

Details: experimentalsociology.github.io
September 10, 2024 at 11:11 AM
aksoyundan.bsky.social

📢 I am organising 2 sessions @ ISA forum in Rabat (6-11jul25). 1st endorsed by European Academy of Sociology is on open science. 2nd on micro-explanations of violence. Abstract deadline Oct15. Details 👇

Open science: isaconf.confex.com/isaconf/foru...

Violence: isaconf.confex.com/isaconf/foru...
Many forms of violence, including wars, honour killings, blood feuds, intimate partner violence, mass murders and many incidences of homicides often involve extraordinary costs even for the perpetrator with unclear or uncertain benefits. As such, they pose thorny puzzles for sociological research and most relevantly for models that incorporate micro-behavioural decision making mechanisms. This session invites contributions on the theoretical and empirical analysis of violence, broadly defined, particularly from but not restricted to micro-level behavioural perspectives. Example questions that the presentations may address are as follows. How can various forms of violence be modelled theoretically? What are the decision mechanisms and motives behind violent acts? Are certain forms of violence “irrational”? Who is more or less likely to be violent? What are the contextual or social determinants of violence? What policies can prevent violence? Contributions can be empirical ... Making sociology an open science with agreed upon standards for reproducibility and credibility is arguably a collective action problem. This session, organised in association with the European Academy of Sociology, invites contributions that explore methods to enhance the reproducibility and credibility of sociological or social science research. Key questions include: How much do papers withstand robustness checks? What conditions promote reproducibility? What are the risk factors for low reproducibility and robustness? How does theory building affect credibility of sociological research and empirical findings? We welcome presentations of reproducibility audits, replication studies or theoretical contributions that investigate reproducibility and credibility in sociology and other social sciences. Contributions on practical journal policies are also welcome. For instance, is requiring open materials sufficient for high reproducibility rates, or is the presence of data editors ...
September 3, 2024 at 9:12 AM
aksoyundan.bsky.social
New pub w Cicada team. During pandemic mental wellbeing gap between people with and without chronic illness widened/social support mediated illness -> wellbeing link. See (OA):
bmcpsychology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....
#Sociology #SocTwitter #SocialSciences #SEM #FIML #CLS
@ioe.bsky.social
March 12, 2024 at 10:38 AM
aksoyundan.bsky.social
UCL maintains a 33rd position globally in Sociology *without* a Sociology department.

www.shanghairanking.com/rankings/gra...
November 17, 2023 at 12:29 PM
aksoyundan.bsky.social
🎤New preprint: Making sense of honor killings? osf.io/preprints/so... with Aron Szekely. We tackle a gruesome and puzzling phenomenon of honor killings using formal modelling, survey data, data on femicides and some computational stuff. First draft, comments very welcome.
October 16, 2023 at 11:38 AM
aksoyundan.bsky.social
🎤 New preprint: "Natural Experiments for Sociological Research" osf.io/preprints/so... In which I review natural experimental designs, their advantages and disadvantages in sociology with a hand-on example. Comments more than welcome.
Introduction of the paper: Voltaire (1756) famously said “this agglomeration which was called … the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire”. One may say the same thing for “natural experiments”. As we will see below, they are mostly neither natural, nor experiments. Indeed, there is confusion over what a natural experiment is, what a quasi-experiment is, and even what an experiment is. Nevertheless, the number of papers with “natural experiment” in their title has exploded in the social sciences in the last decades (Dunning 2012). The reason for this explosion is that compared with standard observational studies, natural experimental designs have some advantages in getting closer to a causal interpretation of empirical associations. It is thus important to have a good understanding of the concept.
September 29, 2023 at 10:19 AM