Emotions, social networks and Turkish political attitudes on the Syria crisis

Abstract

This 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.