This thread of my research addresses the relationship between the city and the state through the lens of local budgets and revenue generation. I investigate political mobilization and distributive conflict at the urban scale, focusing on taxes and homelessness governance in Seattle. This work on urban fiscal politics grounds broader questions about democratizing financial governance across scales of government.
Methods: Case study; archival analysis; key informant interviews
Keywords: Tax reform; political legitimacy; urban coalitions; homelessness; affordable housing; state formation; superstar cities; iterative problem-solving; policy learning; radical flank effect; crisis governance; participatory budgeting
[R&R] Güler, Selen, and Devin Collins. “A Prolonged State of Emergency for Homelessness? The 2015 Proclamations in Seattle and the Exercise of Symbolic Power.” (Co-first authors.)
[in progress] Güler, Selen. “Building the State from Below: Taxation and Subnational State Formation.”
[in progress] Güler, Selen. Book manuscript, tentatively titled Tech Boom to Tax Boom: Urban Power and Redistribution in Seattle.
Quinn, Sarah, Mark Igra, and Selen Güler. “A Modern Financial Tool-kit: Lessons from Berle for a More Democratic Financial System.” In Democratizing Finance: Restructuring Credit to Transform Society, eds. Fred Block and Robert Hockett. Verso. 2022. [preprint], [book].
This work emerges out of a research-practice partnership, supporting and doing research with a community of computer science and engineering educators, who have been awarded the NSF RED grant to 'revolutionize' undergraduate education across institutional contexts.
Methods: Participatory action research; interviews; focus groups; digital ethnography; abducted analysis
Keywords: social movements, movement pedagogies; communities of practice; team formation; institutional context; national science foundation; power; resource mobilization theory; civic action
Margherio, Cara, Anna L. Swan, and Selen Güler. “From Individual Change Agents to ‘Revolutionary’ Teams: The Search and Selection Process of Team Formation within a Community of Practice.” Innovative Higher Education, 1–20. 2024.
[in progress] Güler, Selen, Elizabeth Litzler, and Cara Margherio. “‘We all signed on to this grant for the revolution’: From the Ivory Tower into a Community of Change Agents.”
[under review] Michael W. Beach, Rae J. Han, Selen Güler, Elizabeth Litzler, Isaac Sabat, Teodora Shuman, and Alan Cheville. “Context Matters: Integrating Organizational Theory and Social Network Analysis to Explain Variation in Departmental Change” [conference proceedings version]
In this research, I investigate how race, class, gender, and political ideology relate to everyday moral reasoning and judgments about soda consumption. I examine how evaluations of soda consumption and sin taxes relate to institutional trust, understandings of institutional authority, as well as anticipations of discrimination in health care.
Methods: Mixed methods; factorial survey experiment
Keywords: Situational morality; health & consumption; cultural classifications; race, class, and gender; ideological fault lines; symbolic boundaries; sin taxes; institutional trust; institutional authority
[R&R] Güler, Selen. “The Good, the Bad, and the Healthy: A Factorial Survey Analysis of Situational Morality in Consumption and Healthcare.”
ASA Section on the Sociology of Consumers and Consumption, Student Paper Award (2025 Honorable Mention)