Ashrakat Elshehawy

Postdoctoral Fellow

Stanford University

Welcome to my Website!
أهلاً و سهلاً

I am a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford's King Center on Global Development. I hold a PhD in Politics from the University of Oxford. I was recently a visitor at Yale and before Oxford, I studied at Mannheim focusing on Advanced Quantitative Methods in Political Science.

My research focuses on the Political Economy of Development and Foreign Influence on Domestic Political Economy. My work evaluates effects of foreign interventions on domestic politics, local governance, and public service provision. My PhD dissertation focused on the economic development of local geographies in 19th and 20th century Egypt. I use computational and causal inference methods exploiting historical socio-economic shocks to investigate how interactions between foreigners and locals shape local public service provision and long-term economic inequalities.

My methodological expertise lies in the field of Computational Social Sciences. I employ and advance methods of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computational Text Analysis in a multilingual setting, working with a variety of Western and Arabic languages. My work incorporates retrieval and digitalization of historical maps, textual data, and several other sources of archival data. I am passionate about using my computational skills to generate new sources of quantitative data that reveal valuable information that would be otherwise lost in the archives.

My research has been published or is forthcoming at the Journal of Politics, Perspectives on Politics, and Journal of Peace Research. My published work underlines my strong interest in evaluating the impact of past and present foreign interventions on how societies operate, in applications that span beyond the region of the Middle East.

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.

Photo Credits: Rod Searcey

Interests

Comparative Political Economy
Historical Political Economy
Local Public Good Provision
Politics of Information
Foreign Influence in Domestic Politics
Economic Sanctions
Computational Text Analysis and NLP
Information Retrieval

Education

DPhil (PhD) in Politics, 2023
University of Oxford
Visiting Doctoral Student, 2022
Yale University
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

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

Published and Forthcoming Work

Illiberal Communication and Election Intervention During the Refugee Crisis in Germany.

Perspectives on Politics
Populist discourse - which tends to benefit anti-systemic parties - has been on the rise in the world’s …

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

Last updated on Jun 7, 2022

Using Historical Maps for MENA Political Science Research. American Political Science Association (APSA) MENA Politics Newsletter

Historical maps contain a wealth of information. They enable us to access rare data and reveal information …

Ashrakat Elshehawy

Last updated on Sep 15, 2022

SASCAT: Natural Language Processing Approach to the Study of Economic Sanctions

Accepted at Journal of Peace Reseach
Existing datasets of economic sanctions do not tend to take full advantage of government …

Ashrakat Elshehawy, Nikolay Marinov, Federico Nanni, Jordan Tama

Last updated on Sep 29, 2021

The Importance of a Liberal Power’s Attention to Democratic Elections Around the World

Accepted at Journal of Politics
We introduce the concept of monitoring costs to the study of international affairs: when the agenda of …

Johannes Bubeck, Ashrakat Elshehawy, Nikolay Marionv, Federico Nanni

Last updated on Jul 17, 2022

Some Work in Progress

Ines Rehbein, Nikolay Marionv, Federico Nanni

July 2022 Under Review

Named-Entity Recognition with Application to Foreign Leader Mentions in Congressional Speeches

We introduce Named-Entity Recognition (NER), a semantic tool in Natural Language Processing (NLP), as an approach to extract leader names from a corpus of political text. Identifying references to named entities allows us to use the significant power of text analysis to advance research how and why these entities matter. We offer an algorithm on how to identify leader names and software to help researchers. As an illustration of our approach, we look at the Congressional record. We identify mentions of political leaders running in foreign elections - incumbent leaders and main opposition candidates. We show that Congressional mentions of foreign leaders reflects the positions foreign leaders assume on relations with the U.S., and convey an interest in supporting candidates and democracy. This confirms and extends existing research, while demonstrating the utility of using NER in political science research more generally.

PDF

Miguel Rueda, Nelson Ruiz

June 2022 Work in Progress

Gender and Money in Politics: Evidence from Colombian Local Elections

Nikolay Marionv, Federico Nanni, Jordan Tama

June 2019 Working Paper

Binding Hands or Granting Discretion: Congress, the President, and the Design of Economic Sanctions

Prior scholarship on the role of the U.S. Congress in sanctions policy making has highlighted how sanctions legislating is shaped by domestic political pressures. We move beyond a focus on interest groups, public opinion, and electoral incentives while investigating an important but underappreciated dimension of sanctions legislation – whether and how legislation grants the executive branch discretion regarding its implementation. We explain how deterrence objectives, treaty commitments, signaling concerns, and the uncertainties and trade-offs associated with different issues influence the degree and type of flexibility provided to the executive branch in sanctions legislation. We test hypotheses derived from this argument with evidence from a novel data set, created directly from the complete corpus of U.S. government documents dealing with sanctions from 1988-2016. Our analysis also has important implications for research on the effectiveness of sanctions, high- lighting the importance of taking into account underappreciated legislative design features when evaluating the success or failure of this commonly used policy tool.

PDF Project

Daniella Donno, Nikolay Marionv, Federico Nanni

June 2019 Working Paper

Enforcement through Coercion: American Economic Sanctions and International Human Rights Standards

Though centralized enforcement of global human rights standards is weak, powerful states can act unilaterally to punish rights violations. Focusing on the United States, which is the most frequent ‘sender’ of sanctions for human rights, we theorize how the incentives for sanctions differ across the legislative and executive branches of government, as well as how the legal foundation for sanctions vary across issue area. Employing a new fine-grained dataset of US economic coercion, we examine the conditions under which and the consistency with which the United States employs sanctions for human rights. We show that certain human rights issues, characterized by interbranch agreement and domestic policy externalities, give rise to systems of ‘dedicated’ enforcement where violations are systematically monitored and punishment is more likely. In other more politically-contentious areas, US human rights enforcement is more ad hoc, but nevertheless responds at the margins to international legal commitments: when countries ratify certain certain global human rights treaties, they are more likely to be targeted by US sanctions in the event of rights violations.

PDF Project

My Dissertation Project

The Political Economy of the Local Origins of Public Service Provision: Evidence from 19th & early 20th century Egypt

Alt text for my gif

_{^{Alexandria: Economic History of Inequality under Colonization
watch the GIF below, for an overlay of historical maps of Alexandria in the 19th century on current geographical coordinates. Part of my project mapping the economic history of inequality 💥}}

Data Collection Projects

A Century of Historical Egyptian Schooling Data

Data Collection of Egyptian Modern Schools (w/ Mohamed Saleh, LSE) [more info soon 👐!]

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

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

PDF

Teaching

Graduate:

Python for Social Data Science
Course Convener
Department of Politics and International Relations
University of Oxford
Python and Quantitative Text Analysis for Social Scientists
Course Convener
Department of Politics and International Relations
University of Oxford
Text as Data: Computational Text Analysis
Course Convener
Department of Politics and International Relations
University of Oxford
[Syllabus] [Material on Github]
Applied Statistics for Political Scientists - Lab Sessions
Department of Politics and International Relations
University of Oxford
Computational Text Analysis for Political Science
Department of Political Science
University of Houston
[Syllabus]

Undergraduate:

211: Politics of the Middle East
PPE (Politics, Philosophy, Economics) Degree
Pembroke, St. Hilda’s, and Somerville Colleges
University of Oxford
201: Comparative Government
PPE (Politics, Philosophy, Economics) Degree
University of Oxford
Tutorial: Empirical Political Research in Political Science
Lecture by: Dr. Sean Carey
University of Mannheim, Germany