Siyaset Bilimi Bölümü / Department of Political Science
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Review Two Intellectuals in Foreign Policy Ismail Cem and Ahmet Davutoglu(Uluslararasi Iliskiler Konseyi Dernegi, 2021) Türk, Kerem[No Abstract Available]Book Part Citation - WoS: 4Citation - Scopus: 5Tolerance and Democratization in Turkey(Taylor and Francis, 2016) Erişen, C.Social cohesion and mutual understanding among social groups is an essential component of any democratic society. History has shown that societies which reach a level of homoeostasis have obtained social connectivity and a strong civil society in which people agree to live together within the defined borders of a country. In that respect, Turkish society has faced several social and political challenges since the early 1900s. Even though social cleavages between the center and the periphery or between “traditionalists” and “modernists” go back even earlier, when we look at today’s Turkish society and political realm we see there are major issues of social discontent that have not been discussed openly as well as sources of division. At a time of polarization of political ideologies and attitudes, this chapter tackles one of the important components of social cohesion in Turkish society: tolerance. Limits imposed over freedoms abound in world history. During World War II, for example, when fascist dictators led the world into chaos, we observed how intolerance fueled animosity. The era of McCarthyism in the USA was another period when people faced serious limitations to their civil rights coupled with weakened political tolerance toward whoever differed from the prevailing political norms. In Europe, numerous studies have aimed to understand the interaction of multiculturalism and Euroskepticism, which both relate to tolerance toward immigrants or those born outside the EU member countries. Other survey research evidence demonstrates different aspects of the determinants and consequences of intolerance in South Africa (Gibson and Gouws 2003), Russia (Gibson and Duch 1993; Gibson 1998), and several other countries (Peffley and Rohrschneider 2003). Intolerance is thus a recurring problem where we see polarized societies facing serious social and political challenges, regardless of their democratic status. In Turkey, tolerance has a distinct place and a significant role to play. Turkish politics needs to nourish universal democratic values and to have these values accepted by the general public. Tolerance toward each other is the key to understanding how we can accept ideas with which we disagree. When we ask why this is important, the initial point of departure is the level of polarization in Turkish politics. Polarization imposes a significant influence upon intolerance with evidence of growing public polarization in Turkey over the past five years. © 2016 selection and editorial material, Cengiz Erisen and Paul Kubicek; individual chapters, the contributors.Review The Mutual Construction of Statistics and Society(Statistics Sweden, 2012) Erişen, Cengiz[No abstract available]Article Citation - WoS: 6Citation - Scopus: 5Dividedness, Institutions and Economic Performance: a Cross-National Analysis of Democratic Stability(Springer, 2017) Erişen, Cengiz; Wiltse, Evren ÇelikWhy divided societies face particular obstacles in maintaining democracy is one of the most challenging questions posed in the literature. Several studies posit that ethnically, religiously, and linguistically divided societies are incapable of establishing and holding a democratic system because of their social divisions and institutional weaknesses. We challenge this argument and examine whether political institutional arrangements (constraints over the executive, geographic distribution of political power, and form of government) in addition to economic performance are the crucial factors of success to establish and sustain a democratic regime and social unity in divided states. We use the Quality of Governance time-series standard dataset to test this hypothesis. By analyzing data on 163 states (1960-2012) we find that institutional constraints imposed over the executive and economic performance are the two primary influential factors in sustaining democratic regimes in multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic, and multi-religious societies.Book Part Citation - WoS: 6Citation - Scopus: 1Conceptualizing Democratic Consolidation in Turkey(Taylor and Francis, 2016) Erişen, C.; Kubicek, P.Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi [AKP, or AK Party]) in the early 2000s rank as one of the most dynamic and successful periods in terms of democratic reform. Spurred in part by the prospect of joining the EU, the AKP pushed through measures to expand freedoms of expression and organization, grant rights to the Kurdish minority, curtail the political power of the military, and end human rights abuses such as torture. Civil society also became more active. However, in the 2010s the AKP government has been accused of becoming increasingly authoritarian. This has been evidenced most clearly in the crackdown on media and on protests - the Gezi Park demonstrations in 2013 rank as the largest and best known - but extends into other realms as well, including commitment to rule of law and minority rights. Political polarization is pronounced. Beyond the formal political arena, democracy remains challenged by other factors, including struggles for gender equality and a growing gap between the rich and the poor. Several commentators, including some contributors to this volume, have even raised the question of whether the problems in Turkey have grown so acute that it may make more sense to reconsider whether Turkey meets the general criteria to be regarded as democratic. Third, Turkey has unique importance as the Muslim country with the most extensive experience with democracy. The notion of Turkey as a “role model” for other Muslim states, particularly given its secular and democratic system, has often been invoked by academics and policymakers (Karpat 1959: x, xi; Lewis 1987: xi; Toprak 2005). What is emphasized in that model, however, has varied over time. Under the AKP, a self-described “conservative democratic” party that has roots in earlier Islamist parties, there has been discernible movement away from the assertive secularism of the Kemalist model and toward an approach that allows for a greater role of religion in the public sphere. For example, the vexed headscarf issue - bans on which became one of the most polarizing issues in Turkey - was solved in a manner that granted pious Muslims greater freedom. Scholars have noted the movement away from authoritarian, state-imposed secularism and the rise of a “post-secular society” (Göle 2012). For some, this is the evidence to show that Turkey stands as a good example as a “Muslim democracy” led by a “post-Islamist” party (Nasr 2005; Dagi 2006). Others, however, remain wary of the AKP’s allegedly religious agenda. Critics of the government also bemoan its increasingly oppressive policies in certain domains of politics such as media and freedom of speech. Still others note the continued difficulties faced by ethnic (e.g., Kurdish) and sectarian (e.g., Alevi) minorities. All these factors together question the validity of the argument that Turkey could be a model for the region (Kubicek 2013). Fourth, despite Turkey’s lengthy and dynamic democratic record, it is largely absent in most of the leading scholarly literature on democratization. Most of the comparative work is regionally focused, but because Turkey does not fit neatly into a democratizing region (e.g., Latin America, post-communist Europe, Africa), it rarely features in such work.1 While there are, to be sure, numerous country-level studies of Turkey, many are primarily descriptive and focus on one particular domain or policy area (e.g., the Kurdish question, party development, the role of religion, relations with the EU, foreign policy). These studies often present historical observations of events that could benefit from more rigorous, theory-driven analysis and empirical examination. To that end, in this study we endeavor to cover a broad range of topics and their association with democracy. At the same time, while we do not develop or advance a single grand theory to account for developments in Turkey, we aim to utilize various theories with respect to democratization and advance a theory-informed common framework to orient our study. Indeed, one objective is to have our contributors, notable scholars expert in the various domains of democracy examined in each chapter, introduce theoretical perspectives that they believe best contribute to understanding the topic at hand. While not, in a strict social science manner, a test of competing theories, we believe this approach will allow us to assess the value of different theories and approaches to the multi-faceted issue of democratic consolidation in Turkey. Finally, the above-mentioned debates about Turkish democracy offer an opportunity to reflect, in a rigorous manner, upon the very notion of democratic consolidation. Despite various shortcomings - which will be analyzed throughout this volume - Turkey remains democratic in the most limited and formal sense insofar as political leadership is determined and held accountable by the vote of the people in competitive elections. The AKP’s power, although troubling to some, is a reflection of its popularity, even as its leading figure, President (formerly Prime Minister) Recep Tayyip Erdogan, remains a source of polarization. Although the AKP’s rivals are handicapped in various ways, there is both opposition to the AKP - at times quite vociferous - and specific criticism of Erdogan’s actions and policies. No political actor has been able to successfully challenge the legitimacy of having elections determine who should wield political power. In this respect, democracy has become the “only game in town, " which Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan (1996: 5) posited as the hallmark of a consolidated democracy. However, whether Turkey has a well-functioning democracy is another question, and it hinges on what one means by democracy. While acknowledging that Turkey meets the criteria of what might be called a minimal or electoral democracy whose main attribute is the holding of competitive, multiparty elections, this volume adopts a more holistic understanding of democracy. This is grounded on the idea that democracy is more than just an electoral system; a successful democracy is manifested in several arenas (Linz and Stepan 1996) and/or embedded in interdependent partial regimes and external conditions (Merkel 2004). These components have attitudinal, behavioral, institutional, and constitutional elements and may be considered at the micro and macro levels. At the micro level, we refer primarily to factors formed and operating at the individual level. These include political values, political behavior, identity, orientation toward religion, media influence on citizenry, and public opinion on governmental performance and policies. At the macro level, we refer, inter alia, to overarching conceptualizations of democracy by political elites, the institutional settings that relate to political parties, constraints on the executive, and how the broader socio-economic context affects political development. By analyzing these factors, which will be developed more below, one can begin to unpack the concept of democracy and democratic consolidation and obtain a fuller, more nuanced view of democracy’s fault lines. In this way, our work seeks to address an additional research question - one that could be asked in a number of settings2 - namely why there is a gap between formally democratic rules on the one hand, and, on the other, practices and outcomes that are found wanting by many conceptualizations of democracy. © 2016 selection and editorial material, Cengiz Erisen and Paul Kubicek; individual chapters, the contributors.Editorial Conclusion: Turkish Democracy in 2015 and Beyond(Taylor and Francis, 2016) Kubicek, P.; Erişen, C.Article Citation - WoS: 9Citation - Scopus: 9Assembling a Critical Toponymy of Diplomacy: the Case of Ankara, Turkey(Routledge Journals, Taylor & Francis Ltd, 2023) Sysio, Timo; Ülker, Onat; Tokgöz, NurevşanAn entire subdiscipline of critical toponymy has developed over the past decades to produce theoretically informed approaches to the study of place-naming, in general, and street-naming, in particular. Among other things, research has focused on the colonial politics of street-naming; renaming of streets after a regime change; and the social justice of street-naming. What has not been documented and discussed in detail, however, is street-naming in terms of interstate geopolitics and diplomacy. In light of this omission, the current paper analyses street-naming as a form of diplomatic gift-giving and an element of geopolitical representations. Drawing on the Turkish capital city of Ankara as a case study, our assemblage analysis shows that street-naming as a form of diplomatic gift-giving has multiple underlying intentions, from strengthening existing ties to recognising shared historical, cultural, ethnic and religious narratives. Street names can also be unwanted gifts to punish or shame other countries for breaking alliances or opposing the ruling regime's policies. As a form of ritual exchange, street-naming is highly choreographed and may include the obligation to reciprocate the gift. We end the article by suggesting new angles on, and directions for, critical toponymy and diplomacy research.Article Citation - WoS: 8Citation - Scopus: 11An Assessment on the Behavioral Foundations of Electoral Decisions in the 2015 Turkish General Elections(Routledge Journals, Taylor & Francis Ltd, 2016) Erişen, CengizTurkish politics has overcome several challenges in order to reach a situation with less political uncertainty. Among several issues, voter behavior in the two recent general elections in 2015 is a major topic of interest. In this think-piece, I discuss the behavioral indicators of vote choice and political judgments between the two 2015 elections. To that end, I first explore the context of public polarization before introducing the behavioral approaches to explain voter behavior. I use nationally representative survey data in order to make descriptive inferences that shed light on the unexpected change in electoral behavior.Book Part Citation - Scopus: 6Strategic Voting and Personality Traits(Springer International Publishing, 2016) Erişen, Cengiz; Blais A.Whilst previous work on strategic voting emphasizes a number of factors with respect to voting rules and structural issues in the electoral process there is limited research with respect to its individual determinants. We offer a novel approach to that end and employ an experiment to examine how Big Five personality traits (openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and emotional stability) influence one’s propensity to cast a vote tactically in PR elections with a threshold. Our findings show that openness to experience promotes greater likelihood of strategic voting whereas agreeableness decreases that probability. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016.Book Political Psychology of Turkish Political Behavior(Taylor and Francis Inc., 2016) Erişen, Cengiz; Erişen, CengizThe 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. © 2015 Taylor & Francis. All rights reserved.Review Article Citation - WoS: 3Citation - Scopus: 3Research Methods in Political Psychology [article](Routledge Journals, Taylor & Francis Ltd, 2013) Erişen, Cengiz; Erişen, Elif; Özkeçeci, Taner BinnurGiven the interdisciplinary nature of political psychology research, the methods employed to produce scientific knowledge should be able to answer the questions raised in the discipline. The multitude of methods used in political psychology offers a variety of options for those interested in conducting research in political science. This article explains the basic structure of experimental design, survey research, and content analysis and briefly discusses the recent developments and interest growing on certain methods in the discipline. Each method is discussed in detail to the extent that would be sufficient to understand what one could achieve by using it.Article Citation - WoS: 10Citation - Scopus: 16Exploring the Invocation of Emotion in Presidential Speeches(Routledge Journals, Taylor & Francis Ltd, 2014-12) Villalobos, J. D.; Erişen, CengizScholars have long explored why presidential rhetoric is important and how it matters for public leadership and policy-making. However, relatively few works have considered the role that emotion plays in leadership communication and no research has conducted a thorough examination of the various types of emotions invoked in presidential rhetoric, their frequency, or how they have shaped presidential discourse over time. In this study, presidential speeches across 13 administrations (1933–2011) are examined to provide a first assessment of the extent to which US presidents have invoked fear, anger, and hope across policy domains and key types of speeches.Article Citation - WoS: 79Citation - Scopus: 97Affective Contagion in Effortful Political Thinking(Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2014-04) Erişen, Cengiz; Lodge, Milton; Taber, CharlesWe offer a theory of motivated political reasoning based on the claim that the feelings aroused in the initial stages of processing sociopolitical information inevitably color all phases of the evaluation process. When a citizen is called on to express a judgment, the considerations that enter into conscious rumination will be biased by the valence of initial affect. This article reports the results of two experiments that test our affective contagion hypothesis-unnoticed affective cues influence the retrieval and construction of conscious considerations in the direction of affective congruence. We then test whether these affectively congruent considerations influence subsequently reported policy evaluations, which we call affective mediation. In short, the considerations that come consciously to mind to inform and to support the attitude construction process are biased systematically by the feelings that are aroused in the earliest stages of processing. This underlying affective bias in processing drives motivated reasoning and rationalization in political thinking.Article Citation - WoS: 12Citation - Scopus: 14Strategic Voting and Coordination Problems in Proportional Systems: an Experimental Study(SAGE Publications Inc., 2014-06) Blais, Andre; Erişen, Cengiz; Rheault, LudovicWe investigate strategic voting in proportional representation (PR) systems where parties are organized in pre-electoral coalitions and subject to a vote threshold. We show that such political systems are likely to generate coordination problems among the supporters of a coalition, and we examine voter behavior in this setting using a laboratory experiment with repeated rounds of elections. Our findings suggest that in absence of electoral history, voters cannot coordinate their efforts successfully and are more likely to vote sincerely. However, as history becomes available, the vote threshold induces strategic coordination on parties that performed best in previous elections.Article Citation - WoS: 19Citation - Scopus: 26Emotions as a Determinant in Turkish Political Behavior [article](Routledge Journals, Taylor & Francis Ltd, 2013-04) Erişen, CengizThis article provides an experimental analysis of the role emotions play in Turkish voters' political attitudes and behavior with respect to the Syria crisis. By examining the political effects of emotions, this article contributes to the discussion on Turkish voters' political attitudes and political behavior. Through an experimental design, this study shows how incidentally raised emotions on the Syria issue can influence individual attitudes on foreign policy, interest in seeking more information about the issue, and evaluations of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoan's performance. This article aims to stimulate further research in the literature on the potential effects of emotions in Turkish political behavior.Article Citation - WoS: 7Citation - Scopus: 5The Political Psychology of Turkish Political Behavior: Introduction by the Special Issue Editor [article](Routledge Journals, Taylor & Francis Ltd, 2013) Erişen, Cengiz[No abstract available]Article Citation - WoS: 1Citation - Scopus: 2Emotions, Social Networks and Turkish Political Attitudes on the Syria Crisis(Routledge Journals, Taylor & Francis Ltd, 2015-03) Erişen, CengizThis study investigates the influence of incidentally raised emotions on political interest and threat perception with respect to the Syria crisis while controlling for social network characteristics. Through an experiment conducted in Turkey I show that, while emotions trigger certain behavioural effects on political interest and threat perception, these effects are equally influenced by the social network attributes of the individual. Even though experimentally manipulated emotions alter individual preferences, network extent (the number of individuals one discusses politics with) promotes greater interest in learning about the issue as opposed to those who socialize with ideologically similar individuals. Moreover, results show that the influence of manipulated fear on the degree of threat perceived from the crisis is conditional on one’s social network size.Article Citation - WoS: 37Citation - Scopus: 50The Effect of Social Networks on the Quality of Political Thinking(Wiley, 2013-01) Erişen, Cengiz; Erişen, ElifIn this article we investigate the effect of social networks on the quality of political thinking. First, the article introduces new social network concepts into the literature and develops the corresponding measures. Second, the article explores the quality of political thinking as a concept and develops its measures based on the volume and the causality of thoughts, and their integrative complexity. We make use of a survey to collect information on social networks and the experimental manipulation controls for the effect of policy frames. Our findings consistently show the significant negative impact of cohesive social networks on the quality of policy-relevant thinking. We conclude that close-knit social networks could create social bubbles that would limit how one communicates with others and reasons about politics.Article Citation - WoS: 9Citation - Scopus: 9Attitudinal Ambivalence Towards Turkey’s Eu Membership(Wiley-Blackwell, 2014-03) Erişen, Cengiz; Erişen, ElifThis article takes a comparative political behaviour approach to examine the multifaceted nature of Turkey's European Union (EU) membership bid from the perspective of the EU citizens. We propose a multidimensional explanation for EU citizens' attitude towards Turkey's membership by referring to the political psychology literature on attitudinal ambivalence. We examine whether EU citizens simultaneously hold multiple and conflicting considerations on Turkey's EU accession bid, and whether this ambivalence has attitudinal consequences. To that end, we use the Eurobarometer 66.1 data set to analyze the EU public attitudes on various aspects of possible Turkish EU membership. The findings show that the EU citizens maintain ambivalent views about Turkish membership across three domain pairs: economy-security, immigration-security and population-culture. The significant impact of these ambivalence domains on increasing support for Turkey's membership to the EU is further discussed in the article.
