Political Psychology of Turkish Political Behavior

Cengiz Erisen, Cengiz Erisen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317586074
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The primary motivation for this book is to focus on something crucial that is missing in Turkish political science: well-founded theories on the Turkish voter and empiricism in scholarly research. Given the absence of such theories, one could ask what then the best model is for explaining a Turkish citizen's vote choice and political behaviour, and what schools of thought Turkish political science has. Unfortunately, it is not possible to offer a satisfactory response to either question at this point, and among the clear deficiencies in the current literature the primary one is the lack of a robust model explaining how Turkish citizens form their political attitudes, engage in political participation, or cast their votes. With these important questions in mind, this book aims to generate an interest in the theoretical and methodological tools that one can employ to conduct research contributing to the needs of the literature, particularly in political behaviour and political psychology. This book expands our understanding about the processes and the mechanisms of Turkish political behaviour, and contributes to the foundations of theory building in the literature.

This book was published as a special issue of Turkish Studies.

The Political Psychology of Turkish Political Behavior: Introduction by the Special Issue Editor

CENGIZ ERIŞEN

Department of Political Science, TOBB University of Economics and Technology, Sögütözü, Ankara, Turkey

This special issue aims to contribute to Turkish politics literature through a novel, unexplored aspect of Turkish political behavior. Primarily motivated by behavioral theories, political psychology offers a key perspective to explore and disentangle the multifactorial and multidimensional nature of Turkish political behavior. This introduction gives an account of the general motivation behind this special issue by briefly discussing the goals of this special issue, providing a brief history of the political psychology discipline, introducing the articles in this special issue, and outlining political psychology-related work in Turkey. The article concludes by presenting the acknowledgements.

Goals for This Special Issue

The primary motivation for this special issue is to focus on something crucial that is missing in Turkish political science: well-founded theories on the Turkish voter and empiricism in scholarly research. Given the absence of such theories, one could ask what then the best model is for explaining a Turkish citizen’s vote choice and political behavior, and what schools of thought Turkish political science has. Unfortunately, it is not possible to give a satisfactory response to either question at this point, and among the clear deficiencies in the current literature the primary one is the lack of a robust model explaining how Turkish citizens cast their votes. This is not to ignore, however, all that productive Turkish scholars have done so far. Among these, one can list (in alphabetical order) Ali Çarkoğlu, Yılmaz Esmer, Metin Heper, Ersin Kalaycıoğlu, Sabri Sayarı, and others. Nevertheless, there is a substantial need for more scholarly work in the discipline to build empirically grounded theories and models of Turkish political behavior, although theory building is not an easy task. It requires not only a team of scholars with a collective mindset to produce robust scholarly work, but also researchers with the methodological tools to generate empirical research. Thus, political scientists first need to come together to form a scholarly understanding to conduct projects that can lead to theories of Turkish political behavior.

With respect to the latter issue, it is necessary to expand the amount of empirical work in the literature to the high levels produced in the international literature in the USA and across Europe. Top political science journals in both these areas already mostly publish studies using empirical models, and the usage of quantitative methods is consistently increasing. Considering the political behavior literature in particular, without a doubt empiricism dominates and future scholarly work will likely continue in that direction. In contrast, when examining the Turkish political science literature, one can see only a limited engagement with empiricism.¹ Therefore, in order to keep up with the standards of the international literature, Turkish scholars need to prioritize empiricism and advance their understanding, while at the same time developing new and better theories.

With these goals in mind, this special issue aims to generate an interest in the theoretical and methodological tools that one can employ to conduct research contributing to the needs of the literature, particularly in political behavior. This special issue does not solely focus on the psychological determinants of political attitudes and behavior in the Turkish context. The goal is to expand our understanding about the processes and the mechanisms of Turkish political behavior, and contribute to the foundations of theory building in the literature.

Political psychology is a sub-discipline of political science that focuses on the mechanism of political behavior. Political behavior studies the underpinnings of voter attitudes, decisions, preferences, and behavior. The topics of interest vary greatly with the aim of exploring the behavioral determinants of politics. At the center of this interest, political psychology focuses on the psychological aspects of political behavior by exploring the mechanism. That is, political psychology employs the tools needed to understand how individuals develop their political attitudes, reach political decisions, form political preferences or engage in political action. From a general standpoint, political psychology researches a wide range of topics: personality, values, ideology, political attitudes, emotions, political behavior, information processing, public opinion, foreign policy, strategic interaction, conflict analysis and resolution, communication and media, decision-making, intergroup relations, group identity, prejudice and racial issues, and gender. In researching these domains, political psychology has become the dominant paradigm for explaining citizen attitudes and behavior. The field includes diverse theories and methodological tools. Since both political scientists and psychologists conduct political psychology research, political psychology is, by definition, truly interdisciplinary.

Four Eras of Political Psychology Research

The goal in this section is to give the reader a sense of the initial discussions in the literature and the current status of political psychology in the discipline of political science.² There have been four eras of research in political psychology.³ The first stems from early political psychology studies focusing on personality and psychoanalysis in the aftermath of the World War II. Political psychology in this era primarily focused on understanding obedience to authority and how the authoritarian personalities of Europe’s fascist regimes could have prospered before initiating the conflict that engulfed first the region and eventually the world. This era, from the 1940s to the 1960s, relied strongly on psychoanalysis and behaviorism, with the use of content analysis and interviews as research tools. The theoretical and empirical discussions of the discipline of the time tried to answer some critical questions about war and leader personalities, which became the research priorities of political psychology. In essence, this era provided the introduction to what would later evolve into a key perspective in understanding citizen behavior.

The second era, from the 1960s to the 1980s, focused on political attitudes and electoral behavior, under the influence of the fast developing discipline of economics. The influence of economic rationality on political science theories in this era changed the course of scholarly work in the discipline. Political psychology greatly contributed to the debate about the rationality of political behavior and the dimensions of rational political decision-making.⁴ The effort of examining rational preference formation and citizen behavior produced important scientific studies of political behavior that advanced the previous era’s aims of making qualitative analyses of individual psychology. Seminal works in this era aimed to understand how individuals cast their votes, list their political preferences and form political attitudes. In this era, seminal works of political behavior began to take into account psychology as a critical factor in voting behavior.⁵ Political ideology was also a key topic of interest.⁶ In these studies, survey research was the major tool for data collection and hypothesis testing.

In close connection with the end of the previous era, the third era focused on political ideology, belief systems, and information processing from the 1980s to 2000. Most research examined how citizens process political information and reach decisions. Cognitive heuristics, theories on decision-making, and the division between cold and hot decision processes determined the debate, particularly in the first decade. However, by the early 1990s, the cognitive paradigm was being strongly challenged by the old enemy in the discipline, emotions. With the return of emotions, through powerful experimental studies in social psychology⁷ and developments in neuroscience,⁸ the discipline came to understand the nature of political behavior as a function of both cognition and emotion.⁹ As various studies demonstrated the greater and prior influence of affect and emotion over cognition,¹⁰ the discipline began to understand emotion’s effects and incorporate affective indicators into new models of political behavior. An additional domain of research in this era concerned social networks. Considering citizens as a single entity making political choices is rather limited, while research on social networks and social influences considers citizens within a net of social relations, and develop the tools that control for these effects on political attitudes, participation, and decisions.¹¹ During this era, both experimental and survey methodologies were used to find answers to research questions in political psychology.

While the fourth era has continued earlier work on the nature of political attitudes, affect and emotions, social networks, political ambivalence and framing, at the same time a separate strand of research within political psychology has developed since the early 2000s. With strong connections to natural sciences, neuroscience,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. The Political Psychology of Turkish Political Behavior: Introduction by the Special Issue Editor
• 2. Research Methods in Political Psychology
• 3. Values, Religiosity and Support for Redistribution and Social Policy in Turkey
• 4. The Impact of Party Identification and Socially Supplied Disagreement on Electoral Choices in Turkey
• 5. Analyzing the Determinants of Group Identity Among Alevis in Turkey: A National Survey Study
• 6. Ethnicity and Trust in National and International Institutions: Kurdish Attitudes toward Political Institutions in Turkey
• 7. Emotions as a Determinant in Turkish Political Behavior
• 8. Leadership Traits of Turkey’s Islamist and Secular Prime Ministers
• 9. Public Opinion toward Immigration and the EU: How are Turkish Immigrants Different than Others?
• Index