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)
[under review] Güler, Selen. “From Tech Boom to Tax Boom: Building, Testing, and Rebuilding New Local State Powers for Progressive Taxation in Seattle."
[in progress] McNulty, Stephanie, Alvaro Luis Dos Santos Pereira, Benjamin Goldfrank, Celina Su, and Selen Güler. "Scales of Financial Power: Urban Participatory Institutions in an Age of Austerity."
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.
[under review] 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 edition]
This research investigates how race, class, gender, and political ideology relate to everyday moral reasoning and judgments about soda consumption. It shows that health-related moral reasoning is shaped not by fixed principles applied to behavior, but by situational stakes and the social positions from which people evaluate others, with implications for how political ideology and classed and racialized experiences structure everyday judgments about consumption and policy.
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
Güler, Selen. “The Good, the Bad, and the Healthy: A Factorial Survey Analysis of Situational Morality in Consumption and Healthcare.” Social Science Research. 2026.
ASA Section on the Sociology of Consumers and Consumption, Student Paper Award - 2025 Honorable Mention