Kimberly Guiler, Ph.D.

kimberlyguiler@gmail.com

Lecturer

George Washington University

Year of PhD: 2021

Country: United States (Virginia)

Website

Social Media:

Instagram: kimguiler

About Me:

Kim Guiler is a Foreign Affairs Analyst in the Department of State’s Office of Analysis for Near East Affairs. She has more than 15 years of experience researching and working on politics, public opinion, and security in the Middle East and North Africa. Kim is an expert on democratic backsliding and populist authoritarianism and has lectured on the topics at multiple universities, including George Washington University, the University of Texas at Austin, and Southwestern University. At the Department of State, Kim has covered North Africa, Iraq, and the Kurds. Prior to joining the civil service, Kim was a Pre-Doctoral Fellow with the Middle East Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. She holds a Ph.D. in Government from the University of Texas at Austin, where her research focused on the politicization of victimhood in Turkey and Tunisia. Kim also has a M.A. from the University of Chicago, and B.A. and B.S. degrees and a certificate in Israel Studies from the University of Florida. She speaks Turkish and Arabic and has also studied Hebrew and Spanish.

Research Interests

Middle East & North African Politics

Comparative Democratization

Experimental Research

Political Psychology

Elections, Election Administration, and Voting Behavior

Democratic Backsliding

Hybrid Regimes

Autocratic Populism

Countries of Interest

Turkey

Tunisia

Libya

Israel

Publications:

Journal Articles:

(2021) From prison to parliament: Victimhood, identity, and electoral support, Mediterranean Politics

Are voters more likely to support candidates who are victims of political persecution? I draw on an original survey with embedded experiments deployed in Turkey ahead of the June 2015 General Election to advance a theory linking political victimhood to an electoral advantage. The results suggest that voters primed with information about a candidate’s political imprisonment, on average, report higher ideological affinity with the candidate. In addition, respondents who identify as co-victims are more likely to say they would vote for a candidate who was imprisoned. These findings are significant and hold regardless of which party the candidate belongs to. Respondents presented with a candidate from the incumbent Justice and Development Party also report higher levels of trust and closeness with the candidate who was imprisoned. This pattern is consistent for voters with low trust in the Justice and Development Party leadership and low levels of religiosity, demonstrating that a history of persecution can broaden candidates’ support.

(2020) Conspiracy theories, election rigging, and support for democratic norms, Research and Politics

Under what conditions does conspiratorial rhetoric about election rigging change attitudes? We investigated this question using a survey experiment the day before and the morning of the 2016 US presidential election. We hypothesized that exposure to conspiratorial rhetoric about election interference would significantly heighten negative emotions (anxiety, anger) and undermine support for democratic institutions. Specifically, we expected that Democrats who read conspiratorial information about interference by the Russians in US elections, and that Republicans who read conspiratorial information about interference by the Democratic Party in US elections would express less support for key democratic norms. Our evidence largely supported our hypotheses. Americans exposed to a story claiming the election would be tampered with expressed less confidence in democratic institutions, and these effects were moderated by prior partisan beliefs about the actors most likely responsible for election meddling.