Rasheed Ibrahim

Areas of Interest: democratic accountability, ethnic politics, religion and politics, African politics, concepts and measurements

Rasheed is a third-year doctoral student in Political Science – Comparative Politics and Methods subfields – at the University of Notre Dame and affiliated with the Kellogg Institute of International Studies as a PhD fellow. As a comparativist, he researches democratic accountability in Ghana and Kenya. He looks at how institutional design affects the way constituents demand service and accountability from their representatives. As part of this research, he has conducted elite interviews with Members of Parliament in Ghana about their interactions with their citizens.

As a methodologist, his interests include conceptualizing and measuring religiosity as it shapes political behavior. Using Africa as a case, he hopes to develop a measurement of religiosity that is both cross-national and cross-religion. Rasheed has worked as a country coder on the Varieties of democracy (v-dem) project since 2019. He has also gained field research experience through archival work in Turkey, elite interviews in Ghana and focus groups in Côte d’Ivoire. He holds an MA degree in European Studies, another MA in Political Science, both from Sabanci University, and a BA in International Relations.