Ashrakat Elshehawy

Doctoral Student

University of Oxford

Welcome to my Website!
أهلاً و سهلاً

I am a doctoral student at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford.

My research interests lie in the field of comparative political economy. I focus on aspects related to economic history of state-institutions, local public good provision, informal social-welfare, and the political economy of Islamic institutions, with a regional focus of the Middle East. My research also draws on questions about how foreign policy tools, such as economic sanctions, interact with domestic politics. I am further interested in investigating aspects of the politics of information using methods of computational text analysis. I am currently excited about employing text analysis on corpora of Arabic text, as it is a valuable resource in understanding the political and economic decision-making process in the Arab world.

I have been born and raised in the beautiful city Alexandria, Egypt. I am a former professional swimmer for the Egyptian Swimming National Team, for which I competed professionally for several years. I still find myself thinking more clearly while doing all those endless laps at the pool. I enjoy reading about Islamic Art and Architecture and the Ottoman Empire.

Interests

Comparative Political Economy
Local Capacity and Economic Development
Local Public Good Provision
Economic Origins of State- and Nation-Building
Political Economy of Islam
Islamic Institutions
Economic Sanctions
Computational Text Analysis and NLP
Information Retrieval

Education

DPhil (PhD) in Politics, 2022
University of Oxford
MA in Political Science (Advanced Quantitative Methods), 2018
University of Mannheim
BA in Political Science and Psychology, 2016
University of Mannheim
Visiting Undergraduate Student, 2015
Trinity College Dublin
German Abitur, 2013
Deutsche Schule der Borromaerinnen Alexandria DSBA

Additional Academic Training

I undertook the following further academic training:

2019 Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models (EITM) Summer Institute at the Hobby School of Public Affairs, University of Houston, USA
Scientific Programming with Python at the Hewlett Packard Enterprise Data Science Institute (HPE DSI), University of Houston, USA

Teaching

Graduate:

Computational Text Analysis for Political Science
Department of Political Science
University of Houston
[Code]

Undergraduate:

211: Politics of the Middle East
PPE (Politics, Philosophy, Economics) Degree
Pembroke, St. Hilda’s, and Somerville Colleges
University of Oxford
Trinity Term - April - June 2020
201: Comparative Government
PPE (Politics, Philosophy, Economics) Degree
University of Oxford
Trinity Term Revisions- April - June 2020
Tutorial: Empirical Political Research in Political Science
Lecture by: Dr. Sean Carey
University of Mannheim, Germany
Winter Semester 2017 & 2018 - October 2017 - January 2018

Academic Positions

Research Assistant to Prof. Ben Ansell/Editorial Assistant Comparative Political Studies Journal

Nuffield College, University of Oxford

Jun 2020 – Present Oxford, UK

Visiting Scholar/Pre-doc

University of Houston

Jan 2019 – Jun 2019 Houston, USA

Research Associate

Mannheim Center for European Social Research (MZES), University of Mannheim

Aug 2018 – Sep 2019 Mannheim, Germany

Teaching Assistant

Chair of Quantitative Methods Prof. Thomas Gschwend, University of Mannheim

Oct 2017 – Jan 2018 Mannheim, Germany

Tutorial: Empirical Political Research in Political Science (for the lecture by: Dr. Sean Carey).

Research Assistant

Chair of Empirical Democracy Research Prof. Nikolay Marinov, University of Mannheim

Jan 2017 – Jul 2018 Mannheim, Germany

Student Editorial Assistant

American Political Science Review, University of Mannheim Editorial Team

Oct 2016 – Jan 2018 Mannheim, Germany

Research Assistant

Mannheim Center for European Social Research (MZES), University of Mannheim

May 2015 – Jun 2016 Mannheim, Germany

Research Project: Mediated Contestation in Comparative Perspective

Research Assistant

Gesis Leibniz Institute for Social Sciences

Apr 2014 – Sep 2016 Mannheim, Germany

Division: International Social Survey Programme (ISSP)

My Dissertation Project

More information on my dissertation project will be updated soon.

Photo: Alexandria Map - Bibliothèque nationale de France

Working Papers

Ashrakat Elshehawy, Konstantin Gavras, Nikolay Marinov, Federico Nanni, Harald Schön

May 2020 Under Review

How Hybrid Regimes Use Propaganda for Election Interventions: The Refugee Crisis in Germany

We identify and theorize a new kind of election intervention, by hybrid regimes, in democracies, arising from state-to-state political communication. We argue that instabilities inherent in hybrid regimes cause them to generate a specific type for propaganda for domestic use, one emphasizing illiberal tenets and principles. This discourse is beneficial to populist and anti-systemic parties in democracies. Powerful hybrid regimes send abroad such communication in order to reap the benefits from a non-systemic political ecology in election-holding states. We find evidence for the argument in analysis of the refugee crisis in Germany, where we identify how political communication by Kremlin-sponsored media both aligned with and promoted issues close to the far-right populist AfD party, in a manner dependent on the local election calendar. We discuss the broader implications for this new type of international propaganda on election interventions and the rise of populism.

PDF

Daniella Donno, Ashrakat Elshehawy, Nikolay Marionv, Federico Nanni

June 2019 Working Paper

Heretics or Infedels Economic Sanctions and the Enforcement of Human Rights Standards

The United States uses economic sanctions more than any other power, and American policy makers cite human rights issues as the most frequent justification of sanctions. International human rights standards, embodied in a range of treaties and institutions, commit countries to observe a wide gamut of rights and freedoms. We investigate whether, when and how U.S. sanctions help this emerging human rights regime. Ideally, sanctions would hold violators responsible, and would increase the cost of human rights abuses. We develop a theoretical argument that distinguishes the incentives and capacity of Congress and the Presidency to sanction human rights violations. We argue that agreement between the branches with an international human right standard is important in setting up the type of enforcement that is optimal for target compliance. We also argue that international treaties make a difference, even absent such agreement. We use a new database of U.S. economic sanctions to show that the U.S. has been enforcing international human rights standards in a manner that is perhaps surprisingly robust.

Project

Ashrakat Elshehawy, Nikolay Marionv, Federico Nanni, Jordan Tama

June 2019 Working Paper

Legislating Coercion: Congress, the President and the Design of U.S. Sanctions

In this paper, we study how Congress makes its voice heard in American foreign policy in the area of economic statecraft. Unlike the President, who can alter sanctions policy with the stroke of a pen, Congress cannot change legislation easily in the face of difficulty to anticipate future contingencies. Congress may be able to craft detailed legislation. Congress can also try to allow the President more discretion on the final decision on sanctions. We would predict that when legislation involves more future uncertainty, Congress is more likely to build-in clauses allowing the President flexibility. We also predict that in cases Congress wants to deter future challenges to policy, and to send a signal to governments contemplating some behavior, it will be less likely to offer discretion to the President. Finally, where undermining Presidential bargaining powers can have grave consequences, such as in issues of terrorism, Congress is more likely to defer to the President. We use web-scraping and text-analysis techniques to identify cases where the U.S. Congress or President discussed or imposed sanctions on foreign nations or entities. We use this dataset to study how Congress designs economic sanctions.

Project

Ashrakat Elshehawy, Nikolay Marionv, Federico Nanni

May 2019 Working Paper

Quantifying Attention to Foreign Elections with Text Analysis of U.S. Congress and the Presidency

We use web-scraping and text-analysis techniques to identify cases in which the U.S. government discussed democratization in other states, as well as considered or imposed foreign policy measures to affect liberalism abroad. We focus our search around periods surrounding foreign elections. Elections are important for democratization, and attract intense international scrutiny. We comb through more than 1.2 million documents contained in the Congressional Record and all congressional legislation, as well as the American Presidency Project. We utilize Natural Language Processing (NLP) approaches to extract all instances related to our search. The documents we retrieve represent the first measure of attention by U.S. Congress and the President to democratization and electoral practices abroad. Our approach improves considerably the precision, coverage and granularity of existing data. Democratization has been a prominent U.S. foreign policy goal yet researchers have been hampered by lack of appropriate tools to study the topic. Our data can be used as is, or further processed, to relate U.S. policy commitments to policy outcomes. We provide some examples. We utilize a set of best practices that, together with the data and code we supply, can be used by scholars in a wide variety of settings, to collect information on any policy response by a bureaucratic entity.

PDF Project

Ongoing Data Collection Projects

U.S. Statements and Actions on Sanctions, Computer-Assisted-Text Approach

Data Collection Project of US Sanctions using Text-Analysis and Machine Learning Techniques

My personal blog

Take a look at my personal blog. The main emphasis of my blog is to make academia more accessabile for Arab Researchers. I will post here about opportunities that I learn about as I navigate the academic world. Other than that, I will be posting about fascinating things I learn through my travel and in my home country. Expect some movie and book reviews.

Featured Post:

My first post discusses my personal motivation for starting this blog. “Growing up in the Middle East, specifically in Egypt, where economic inequality is a pressing problem, I have always wondered about the way to becoming an academic and get a top-class education. Academia seemed inaccessible, especially for Arab women.
نشأت في الشرق الأوسط، وتحديداً في مصر، حيث تمثل عدم المساواة الاقتصادية مشكلة ملحة. لطالما تساءلت كيف يمكن للمرء أن يصبح أكاديميًا ويحصل على تعليم عالي المستوى. بدت الأوساط الأكاديمية بعيدة المنال، خاصة بالنسبة للمرأة العربية.Read more

I am honored, to have said a few words recently about the importance of opportunities for refugees to access higher education, also to introduce our great speakers Natasha Kaplinsky OBE and Lord Dubs to the event “Stepping up for Refugees” organized by Somerville College and Mansfield College of the University of Oxford. Read more and access the video

Other posts include: Andalusia, Art and Architecture - الأندلس، الفن والعمارة