My name is Semra Sevi. I am a Banting postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University. At Columbia, I work with Donald Green.

Broadly speaking, I am interested in voting behaviour, political representation, public opinion, legislative politics, partisanship and political methodology.

My research projects use a variety of quantitative methods. I employ observational data, experiments, as well as causal inference designs. Before Columbia, I earned my PhD in Political Science at the Université de Montréal and my Honours BA and MA from the University of Toronto.

My dissertation, What Voters Want: Identifying Voter Preferences for Candidates, examines voters decisions of whom to support. In doing so, I focus on the following candidate characteristics: gender, age, occupation and incumbency. To address these questions, I built an original database of candidate-level observations for elections since 1867 in Canadian federal elections–the largest collection of this kind (downloaded on Dataverse over 1,444 times). The database includes variables for unique id (which standardizes candidates names across time), names of candidates, riding names, unique identification number for each riding, province, date of birth, gender, occupation, occupation categories, party affiliation, party categories, switchers, incumbency status, vote shares, raw votes, indigenous origins, candidates who identify as a member of the LGBTQ2+ community and so on. Here is more information.

Ongoing projects include:

The Effects of Proposal Power on Incumbents’ Vote Share: Updated Results from a Naturally-Occurring Experiment (with Donald P. Green).

Legislative Log-rolling: Using a Proposal Lottery to Identify Causal Effects (with Donald P. Green)

To run or not to run (with André Blais).

Do voters punish women politicians more? (with Charles Crabtree and André Blais).

How do voters perceive opportunistically timed elections? (with Marco Mendoza Aviña and Ruth Dassonneville).

*If you are a first-generation student applying to political science Ph.D. programs, I would be more than happy to discuss and give comments on your materials.