The study of emotion is a growing field that has received significant research interest from across the disciplines. From natural sciences to social sciences, the emotional nature of both humans and animals has caught the attention of the researchers. Perceiving humans only as coldly, calculating beings under the basic assumptions of rationality has led to a one-sided interpretation through much of the twentieth century. Research on emotions has largely challenged these interpretations and forced the opening of a new era in exploring citizen behavior, particularly since the early 1990s.
The reflection of this change in political science has been a surge in research and publications that tackle various aspects of emotions across a wide range of topics (Conover and Feldman 1986; Marcus and MacKuen 1993; Lodge et al. 1995; Brader and Marcus 2013; Redlawsk and Pierce 2017). Important developments include more studies being conducted on citizen behavior (Kuklinski 2008, 2009) and an increasing reliance on empirical methods, particularly experiments (Druckman et al. 2006, 2011). Since the cognitive science revolution in the 1950s, the behavioral paradigm has influenced much scholarly work across the social sciences, such that identifying the determinants of behavior and understanding individual differences have dominated research in political science. Closely related to this growing research on citizen behavior was the use of empirical methods supporting scientific foundations of the discipline. Work in political science, and political psychology in particular, focused on testing the complex interaction between cognition and emotion across various domains.
Coupled with this general interest in emotions, comparative applications and empirical studies have applied and extended the theoretical assumptions of this research paradigm to different locations and populations. While differences have always existed across countries, differences between groups within a country in todayâs politics are increasingly emphasized, with widening public polarization. Todayâs contextual realities in fact possess similar attributes across various countries. In that regard, in several developed countries, nationalist attachments, strongly supported by political rhetoric that promotes the views of the predominant group, have provoked conflict among civil factions, increased bias across political alignments, and emphasized group cleavages while pushing minorities toward the periphery. In this context, emotions take a prominent role integral to all aspects of citizensâ judgment, decision-making, and behavior.
This book tackles the Turkish case from the perspective of emotions to explore growing polarization and populism and their effects across an array of domains in Turkish public opinion. Although the foundations of political behavior of the Turkish electorate have strongly relied on collective emotions as a result of the long list of political and social experiences in the countryâs history, very limited work has been published on the topic. Various events have formed, changed, and shifted public opinion over the decades, but the reasons as to how the public reacted to these events have not been studied from the lens of emotions. More interestingly, given all the intricacies of the recent events in contemporary Turkish politics, the nature of emotionsâ status as the central aspect of the behavioral mechanism of the public is a topic of significant interest. This book thus attempts to capture the causes and consequences of emotions in Turkish political behavior in a time of major challenges and heightened populism.
As Turkey has become a topic of discussion due to her failing democracy and increasing authoritarianism, it is not an isolated case as politics has become polarized in several EU member states, the USA, and other democratically advanced countries. The rising tide of the populist politics across the globe has forced various democracies to reconsider and reevaluate the factors that in the first place made these countries a democracy. Across Europe, anti-EU, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim parties have been gaining traction in the political system. Eastern European countries, Poland and Hungary, have already taken their position under the populist rule of autocrats. Back in June 2016, the UK public, with a slim margin, favored Brexit and psychologically distanced the island further from the EU (Norris 2017).
Equally important, two of the founding members of the EU have recently held their general elections in 2017 with major implications for the future of Europe. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders is leading a nationalist and anti-immigration partyâand, after the 2017 elections, the major oppositionâthat is becoming highly popular among the Dutch electorate. In France, Marine Le Pen of the National Front, now the major opposition party in French Parliament, is a big supporter of nationalist and anti-immigration policies, just as other leaders of the conservatives in the country. Across Germany and the Netherlands, PEGIDA has organized several demonstrations, and the group has been receiving significant interest from the anti-immigrant organizations in Europe. Chancellor Merkel is under growing political and public pressure because of leading policies that allow more refugee settlements across Germany, which will be an important topic for the upcoming election campaigns. Moreover, political leaders in Italy and Austria openly favored anti-immigration policies to gain further influence in the public in favor of a populist regime. In all these events, political rhetoric has been nationalist, divisive, exclusive, at times, racist, and against the foundational values of the EU and a democratic regime.
In a polarized environment where populist preferences lead politics at all domains, emotions are used to gain popular support with the fear of terrorist, cultural, or economic threats, emphasis of the nationalist values of pride, overvalue of in-group identity with heightened out-group anger, and divisive politics weakening the social and political unity. As I will argue and demonstrate throughout this book, the causes and consequences of the populist spring are similar to each other across the contexts, at the center of which stands the emotions employed in forming and changing citizen behavior.
Motivated by the general contextual effects and the greater interest in emotions in political psychology, this book offers an in-depth assessment of Turkish political behavior through the lens of emotions. Instead of taking a generalist approach, the book stems from growing research on emotions in political science and sheds light on the role of three most relevant emotions to the contemporary challenges of the Turkish public. As the focus is on three specific emotionsâanger, fear (or anxiety),1 and enthusiasmâthe political domains through which I study these emotions cover a broad range of political behavior of the Turkish electorate. In that regard, two particular qualities should prove interesting for the reader. First, this book is unique in taking emotion research into a comparative context as distinct as Turkey, not only with respect to its country-specific attributes of being one of the last remaining democratic countries in the Muslim-majority world but also with respect to the political and social challenges the country has encountered over the last few years. Second, this book represents one of the very first extensive applications of emotion research in the Turkish political science literature. In the following sections, I explain my motivation for this project, its comparative nature, and the detailed plan of the book.
1 Point of Departure
In close connection with the study of cognition in the social sciences, emotions were notable for challenging the foundations of rational judgments. Through powerful experimental studies in social psychology (Zajonc 1980, 2000) and empirical advances in neurosciences (Gray 1987; Damasio 1994), political science began to understand the effects of emotions and incorporate affective factors into models of political behavior. Other social sciences, such as economics, business administration, and, most prominently, decision sciences (Loewenstein et al. 2001), paid careful attention to the interaction of cognition and emotion, conducting studies of emotions in their own research domains.
Existing research confirms that the interaction of cognition and emotion can be a constructive force shaping individual behavior. Although affectâs impact on behavior was once conceived of as a by-product of cognition, it is now viewed as both a motivational component underlying information processing strategies and a direct source of information that individuals consult in making social judgments (Brader and Marcus 2013; Redlawsk and Pierce 2017). Numerous surveys and well-designed experiments have replicated several findings on the role emotions play in political decisions and established strands of emotion research that have led scholars to appreciate the influence of emotions in all aspects of political life.
The study of emotions is now a thriving domain of research. Prominent among these studies is research into how emotions infiltrate the formation of political preferences, decisions, and behavior. A multifaceted and fast-growing research literature on emotions has produced a well-cited body of scholarly work and strengthened the prominent position of political psychology in political science. The research domain is extensive where political scientists have focused on explaining the causes and consequences of emotions with various approaches and methodologies converging on three specific emotions, anger, fear, and enthusiasm. There has been much debate on how to conceptualize and measure these emotions (as discussed in greater detail in Chap. 3); the focus has been on differentiating the two negative emotions, anger and fear, which appear to possess similar causes but exert distinct effects on behavior. In contrast to these negative emotions, the positive emotion of enthusiasm provides a comparison as the feel-good motivations. Drawing from these foundations, this book explores the multitude of effects evoked by anger, anxiety, and enthusiasm across an array of political domains in the Turkish context.
These three emotions deserve particular attention regarding their capacity to explain a range of domains in citizen behavior. Within the wide array of emotions, I focus on these three particular emotions as the most relevant ones to explore the behavioral mechanism of the Turkish citizenry at the time of rising populism. These emotions are not only among the most studied and explored ones in contemporary emotions literature but also the most important ones for the Turkish context providing the opportunity to capture diverging attitudinal and behavioral outcomes. Anger and anxiety, mostly categorized as two negative emotions, promote distinct risk assessments and involvement with politics that resonate with the events taking place in contemporary Turkish politics. Considering the events of the last few years, one could see that anger at political figures, policies, and changes in life as opposed to the threat of terrorism, economic uncertainties, and political instability deeply affects how Turkish citizens reach rational political judgments and decisions. In contrast, enthusiasm for political leaders, a stable political environment, democratic values and institutions, growing economy, and a better future, all together, compose a different perception of the country. This book will evaluate and study these distinct perspectives through the lens of targeted emotions.
1.1 Comparative Understanding of Policymaking and the Public
Most previous research about emotions has been published in the US context. Since the foundations of the emotion theory stem from scientific inquiries that disregard context (or even the policy domain within which emotions are studied), substantive inferences are still applicable across contexts, populations, and time. The study of emotions in this book also relies on the scientific principle that inferences are generalizable across locations, populations, and time. Earlier findings regarding how emotions influence citizen behavior should also hold ground in a test as long as the scientific foundations are provided. Even more important is the argument that the lack of comparative work in emotion-based studies would be equally threatening to the generalizability of the inferences. In turn, theories that relate to different locations and populations w...