Welcome!

I am Ahmed Ezzeldin Mohamed, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST), Toulouse School of Economics (TSE). My research sits at the intersection of comparative politics, political economy, and religion, with a regional focus on the Middle East and the broader Muslim world. Across my work, I study how institutions operate in practice, how regimes and elites manipulate them to reproduce inequalities and maintain control, and under what conditions these same institutional environments can create openings for political responsiveness, reform, and the empowerment of marginalized groups.

My research spans several connected areas within comparative politics and political economy: religion and politics, authoritarianism, gender politics, political behavior, and development. My book project shows how religious norms can function as alternative accountability mechanisms by shaping distributive politics and government responsiveness in Muslim societies. Other projects examine religious reform and belief change, the political consequences of Islamic education, authoritarian strategies of indoctrination, cooptation, repression, and electoral violence, the economic roots of religious voting cleavages, the long-term effects of violent elections and religious conflict, gender inequality and women’s political participation in Muslim societies, and the effects of conspiracy theories and misinformation on political attitudes and behavior. A related policy-facing stream extends this agenda into applied work on refugee resettlement, behavioral interventions, and welfare-improving public policy.

Methodologically, I utilize a diverse set of quantitative and qualitative tools for data collection and analysis such as web-scraping, machine learning, automated text analysis, causal inference, experiments, survey analysis, historical analysis, ethnography, and extensive fieldwork.

Before joining IAST-TSE, I was a postdoctoral research scholar at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law and a predoctoral research fellow at the Middle East Initiative at Harvard Kennedy School. I received my PhD (with distinction) in Political Science from Columbia University and am a fellow of the Association for Analytic Learning about Islam and Muslim Societies (AALIMS).

My research has appeared in or is forthcoming at journals including the Journal of Politics, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Comparative Political Studies, Politics and Religion, and Journal of Experimental Political Science. My work received multiple awards: the APSA 2022 Weber award for best conference paper on religion and politics, the APSA 2022 Kenneth D. Wald award for best graduate student paper on religion and politics, the MPSA 2019 Kellog/Notre Dame award for best paper in comparative politics, the APSA 2020 politics and history section’s award for best paper, and the APSA 2020 European politics and society section’s award for best paper. My dissertation received an honorable mention for best dissertation by the MENA Politics Section at APSA in 2023.

Alongside my academic work, I care deeply about using scientific methods to address real-world policy problems. I work with practitioners and policy organizations on projects related to refugee resettlement, social policy, and behavioral interventions, and I have also served as a behavioral data analyst and algorithm engineer at Pairity, a startup developing technological solutions for refugee resettlement in Europe and the United States.