Melis Laebens is currently a PhD candidate at the Political Science Department of Yale University. She got two undergraduate degrees at Boğaziçi University, one in Political Science and International Relations, and the other in Economics. Laebens furthermore holds an MA degree from Yale University. She is also a Fox Fellow at Free University of Berlin. Her dissertation research focuses on party organization, executive aggrandizement and democratic backsliding. In addition, she is conducting research on partisanship and political behavior in Turkey, and on the relationship between parties and civil society organizations in Poland. Moreover, she is a co-founder of the Northeast Working Group on Turkish Politics, a collective of graduate students whose research focuses on Turkey.