Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Aykaç E.(Yürütücü), Ürgen B. M., Tulumtaş D.
Yükseköğretim Kurumları Destekli Proje, 2023 - 2024
Understanding human cognition and behavior in various social contexts is a fundamental research area of social cognition. Specifically, it makes it possible to unravel complex social phenomena. Voting behavior is one of those complex social phenomena which has been of great interest to not only psychologists but also several professionals from sociology, political science, history, economics, and geography all over the world. There is considerable empirical evidence that examines how people’s political attitudes and voting behavior have been formed and shaped in different countries. However, determining the factors that underlie the voting behavior is a complex task since it requires investigation of explicit, controlled, and/or deliberative declarations of people as well as implicit thoughts that may arise even without the conscious awareness of the individuals. In this respect, understanding political preferences and voting behavior necessitate the assessment of both implicit and explicit factors that underlie human behavior, especially when people’s perception towards the current political views is uncertain. Given the political ground, the economic and socio-cultural background, and previous voting behaviors, Turkey is one of the countries where it is not straightforward to draw a clear picture of the exact political motivation of voting behavior. Besides, describing the current positions of the parties from a single dimension, such as left-wing/right-wing, would also not be a valid way of evaluating Turkey’s current condition. Therefore, the current political preferences and voting behavior of individuals living in Turkey and the factors that govern them are largely unknown. In the current project, we propose that the current political views in Turkey can be very broadly defined in two diverse positions: political views (and parties) that put emphasis on individual rights and freedom (instead of prioritizing their ideologies), and political views (and parties) that put emphasis on party-line voting (e.g., based on ideologies). By taking this novel definition into account, this project aims to investigate explicit and implicit factors that are associated with political attitudes and voting behavior in Turkey. To this respect, both explicit measures (i.e., explicit declarations of people) and a widely used implicit measure (i.e., Implicit Association Task) will be used to examine to what extent there are differences between people’s explicit and/or conscious statements and their implicit thoughts associated with voting behavior. In line with the suggestions of recent studies on voting behavior, we do not expect to observe a difference between the results of explicit and implicit measures of people who are already decided on their political preferences. On the other hand, the so-called undecided voters who do not have a clear political preference will tend to act under the influence of their implicit thoughts. Furthermore, we will also examine how age, sex, education, socio-economic status, religion, and region modulate any difference between the results of explicit and implicit measures. Overall, the current project aims to generate a map-like representation of the findings obtained from various groups and enhance the understanding of voting behavior in Turkey. Those findings might, in turn, have significant impacts on societal and political domains.