Polarisation and youth in Turkey: young people as gatekeepers or challengers of polarisation?

ABSTRACT

Amid global trends of increased polarisation and Turkey’s deep-seated ethnic, religious, and cultural cleavages, polarisation poses significant risks to democratic sustainability in Turkey. This study, leveraging a 2017 national survey and in-depth interviews with young people during a pivotal shift to a presidential regime, explores whether youth remain divided by political attitudes and cultural values or challenge entrenched divisions in society. We found that both sociocultural identities (being religious or secular) and partisan identities (supporting the ruling powers or the opposition) create issue-based polarisation among youth. Contrary to expectations, however, this polarisation does not extend to an affective one, suggesting a complex, nuanced landscape of political engagement and potential for bridging divides.

KEYWORDS:

• Youth
• issue-based polarisation
• affective polarisation
• depolarisation
• Turkey

Ordinary citizens are turning away from each other around the world. Both established and less consolidated democracies are experiencing the growth of mass polarisation, which not only divides citizens into issue-based or ideologically opposite camps but also aggravates social and emotional distance in society. Mass polarisation is frequently rooted in ‘historically formed social, political, and economic cleavages’ (Nugent 2020, p. 3), which are activated by polarising elites for political gains and consequently generate serious political repercussions for the future of democracy (McCoy, Tahmina Rahman & Somer 2018). While polarisation breaks down the everyday political interactions among people (Wells et al. 2017), the increasing alignment of partisanship, ideology, and sociocultural identity (Mason 2015; Abramowitz & McCoy 2019) rigidifies political preferences and erodes political rationality, endangering the prospects for political moderation and compromise.

This study focuses on the case of Turkey to investigate the extent and character of polarisation among young people. We adopt a loose definition of polarisation and define it as ‘the extent to which groups dislike each other and the extent to which they disagree with each other’ (Nugent 2020, pp. 292–293). Accordingly, we specifically focus on the following questions: Do young people in Turkey with different partisan and sociocultural identities remain affectively polarised or do they re-negotiate and disrupt the affect-based distance and hostility in society? To what extent are young people polarised in critical issues and where do these issue divergences originate from? To answer these questions, we draw upon an original nationwide survey and thirty-eight in-depth interviews with young people in Turkey. The research was conducted in the summer of 2017, which was the immediate aftermath of the 2017 referendum for a transition to a presidential regime. The timing of the research was thus crucial to explore the broader dynamics and character of polarisation in Turkey, since the debates on presidential transition and the campaign process for the referendum constituted one of the milestones of Turkey’s polarisation trajectory, escalating inter-party hostility.

Affective polarisation, that is, inter-party hostility driven by strong partisanship turning into a social identity (West & Iyengar 2022), has recently attracted more attention in polarisation studies. Robust research has thus far shown the global rise of affective polarisation (Orriols & León 2020), identified different factors behind its growth (for a brief overview see: Hernandez, Anduiza & Rico 2020), and focused on the political consequences ranging from higher propensity to vote (Serani 2022) to democratic decline (McCoy, Tahmina Rahman & Somer 2018). However, the impact of demographic factors, in particular age and generation, on the extent and manifestations of affective polarisation remains under-researched. Recent studies have indeed underlined that age has turned into a salient political identity in certain contexts. Young people tend to vote more for particular parties (Pew Research Center 2018), manifest lower support for authoritarian populism (Norris & Inglehart 2019), and differ from the old concerning their positions on certain issues such as the climate crisis (Hilder & Collin 2022) or Brexit (Hobolt, Leeper & Tilley 2020). The first theoretical endeavour of this study is thus to investigate whether being young generates different dynamics and outcomes in the process of affective polarisation.

The predominant focus on affective polarisation is not surprising considering the degree to which affect-based divisions jeopardise democratic coexistence by creating an ‘us vs. them’ dichotomy. However, a more traditional and formalistic type of mass polarisation, issue-based polarisation, and its connection with affective polarisation also necessitate a nuanced analysis. In particular, we know little about how strongly politicised identities, which drive affective polarisation, create divergences in issue positions and with what impacts on the level of affective polarisation. The present study fills this gap by specifically analysing to what extent partisanship and sociocultural identities (of being pious and secular in the case of Turkey), which increasingly align to generate affective polarisation (Mason 2015, 2016b), interplay in the unfolding of issue-based polarisation and how being young interferes in the process.

We examined the case of Turkey to explore these theoretical puzzles since it has emerged as one of the most notorious examples of mass polarisation (Aydın-Düzgit 2019; Somer 2019; Erdoğan & Uyan Semerci 2020). Cleavages based on religious, ethnic, sectarian, and partisan identities have shaped political dynamics throughout the history of modern Turkey. During the last decade, however, the ruling AKP (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi – Justice and Development Party) has adopted a ‘polarising rhetoric’ as a political strategy by activating and reinforcing historical cleavages to consolidate power and facilitate autocratic transformation (McCoy, Tahmina Rahman & Somer 2018, p. 31). Incumbent-led polarisation in Turkey has divided society into hostile camps of pro-government and anti-government partisans cross-cutting secular-religious, urban-rural (ibid, p. 32), and ethnic divisions.

This study found that being young in Turkey interacts with the dynamics of polarisation in complicated ways. On the one hand, similar to older cohorts, high levels of issue-based polarisation persist among youth. While partisanship (i.e. supporting the ruling party or the opposition) fosters and sustains divisions in the opinions of young people about critical political events such as the Gezi Park protests, the 2016 coup attempt, and the transition to a presidential system, sociocultural identity (being pious or secular) creates polarisation on cultural issues, ranging from religious attire to the consumption of alcohol in public spaces and LGBT+ rights. On the other hand, in contrast to general trends, young people resist affective polarisation. They place a high value on establishing and sustaining friendships with peers from diverse cultural and political backgrounds and they are pioneers in coexistence at school and in the workplace. Furthermore, diverse young people in Turkey share similar challenges and anxieties in the transition to adulthood, which might potentially unite them around a common political imagery.

The article begins with a literature review of the current approaches in the study of contemporary mass polarisation and continues by discussing the polarisation debate in Turkey (with a special focus on the younger generation). The methodology of this research is then highlighted. In the final section, the main findings of the research are discussed.

Current approaches in the study of mass polarisation: affect, issue-based polarisation, and youth

Despite certain analytical difficulties in classification, past and present studies distinguish between different forms of polarisation. Sartori’s pioneering work (Sartori 1990), for example, examined polarisation at the level of party systems and defined it as the ideological distance between political parties characterised not only by their different policy positions but also by their disagreements about the established rules and norms of the political system. A related form of polarisation emerged at the level of the political elite. Most studies on elite polarisation have focused on formal political actors, such as politicians and legislators (Hetherington 2001), and highlight their uncompromising positions on vital issues. However, the study of elite polarisation may also be extended to include elites outside of the formal political arena, such as interest groups and media figures (Carothers & O’Danohue 2019). When party and elite-level polarisation permeate society or reinforce existing cleavages, mass or societal polarisation comes into play (McCoy, Tahmina Rahman & Somer 2018).

Each form of polarisation generates critical and historically persistent political outcomes. Mass polarisation, however, occupies a more central place in the latest works on polarisation because it has recently become globally prevalent with serious repercussions for the future of democratic governance. Polarised societies have shaped the dynamics of politics in countries as diverse as the United States (Mason 2015; Abramowitz & McCoy 2019), Poland (Fomina 2019), Italy, Spain, Greece (Bosco & Verney 2020; Tsatsanis, Teperoglou & Seriatos 2020), Turkey (Somer 2019), Hungary, and Venezuela (McCoy, Tahmina Rahman & Somer 2018). In most of these cases, mass polarisation has engendered or facilitated the contemporary trend of democratic backsliding and in some cases democratic breakdown (McCoy, Tahmina Rahman & Somer 2018; Carothers & O’Danohue 2019).

Research on mass polarisation has identified ideological or policy-based differences among citizens as major manifestations of a polarised polity (Tsatsanis, Teperoglou & Seriatos 2020), which, to a certain degree, could be considered healthy for a well-functioning democracy (McCoy, Tahmina Rahman & Somer 2018). However, politically opposing groups today are socially and emotionally drifting apart as well. Drawing upon earlier studies of social psychology and social identity theory (see, for example, Tajfel 1970), recent studies have underlined the saliency of affect. Affective polarisation, or ‘the extent to which partisans view each other as a disliked out-group’, appears as a ‘more diagnostic indicator’ of the presence of mass polarisation (Iyengar, Sood & Lelkes 2012, p. 406). It emerges when partisanship turns into an ever-stronger social identity (West & Iyengar 2022) that is no longer limited to rational and temporal political preferences based on the ‘performance or issue positions of parties’ (Hernandez, Anduiza & Rico 2020, p. 2). In addition to strong partisanship that drives affective polarisation, recent research has also attracted attention to the trend of partisan sorting referring to the alignment of partisanship with ideology (Mason 2015; Bafumi & Shapiro 2009), race, and religion (Abramowitz & Saunders 2008; Abramowitz & McCoy 2019). In other words, partisan attachments consistently align with sociocultural identities in creating polarised attitudes, preferences, and political behaviour. A typical example is the increasing concentration of religious conservatives in the Republican Party in the United States (Abramowitz & McCoy 2019).

The manifestations of affective polarisation include emotional responses such as negative attitudes and distrust of out-group members (Orriols & León 2020; Nugent 2020), in-party and in-group bias, and social distance markers such as reservations about a son or daughter marrying a supporter of the other party (Iyengar, Sood & Lelkes 2012; Iyengar et al. 2018). In the United States, for example, Republicans and Democrats are not only severely divided over issues such as gun control and immigration (Carothers 2019), but they also strongly dislike the candidates of the opposing party (Abramowitz & McCoy 2019) and disapprove of cross-party marriages more than they did in the past (Iyengar, Sood & Lelkes 2012). The ruling party’s polarising rhetoric in Poland has similarly divided people into two hostile camps. Pro- and anti-government constituencies have developed conflicting interpretations of contemporary political events; they have increasingly started to live in ‘bubbles’ exposed only to news media aligned with their political views; and they have shrinking spaces of social and cultural interaction (Fomina 2019). In Venezuela, pro- and anti-Chavista affiliations have turned from political identities to social identities and have fostered dislike and distrust of the opposing group (Garcia-Guadilla & Mallen 2019). McCoy, Tahmina Rahman and Somer (2018) showed that polarisation in such contexts has attained a ‘pernicious’ character in which citizens ‘come to believe they can no longer coexist in the same nation’ (p. 19). Those sentiments significantly weaken prospects of political compromise, turn fellow citizens affiliated with the other party into ‘an existential threat’ that should be managed through illiberal policies, and eventually bring about democratic erosion (p. 26).

Despite the resurgence of interest in the indicators, manifestations, and political consequences of affective polarisation, recent studies have not investigated whether demographic factors and, in particular, age or generation, are predictors of affective polarisation. We propose that structural change as well as weaker saliency of historical cleavages lessen the impact of affective polarisation on young people. On the one hand, young people today, who have globally grown up in more urban and culturally diverse contexts with more gender equality, expanded access to higher education (Norris & Inglehart 2019), and exposure to the digitalised world, tend to resist the infusion of partisan polarisation into intimate relations and school/work environments. On the other hand, when historically salient sociocultural or partisan identities become less relevant in shaping everyday life in the process of generational replacement, their potential for creating conflict diminishes. In the case of Turkey, for example, the removal of the headscarf ban at schools and public institutions since the 2010s has enabled the interaction of pious and secular youth on a daily basis, which has constituted a lived experience different from what previous generations of youth went through with respect to religious-secular identities.

Despite the recent focus on affective polarisation, issue-based divisions along with ideological distance constitute more traditional yet prominent factors in the study of mass polarisation. The differences between affective and issue-based polarisation are evident: while affective polarisation is identity-based, reflects emotions, and permeates into social relations, polarisation on specific issues is assumed to be driven by the rational considerations of voters. However, the connection between these seemingly different types of polarisation necessitates more attention (Tsatsanis, Teperoglou & Seriatos 2020). Even though the existing evidence highlights consistency between voters’ positions on issues and party loyalties’ (Muste 2014), we do not know in what ways each politicised identity (rather than rationality) creates issue-based divisions and how these divisions, in turn, aggravate affective polarisation (Bougher 2016). In this paper, we argue that partisan identity and sociocultural identity do not necessarily align in the emergence of issue-based polarisation. Young people with similar socio-cultural identities (being pious or secular in the case of Turkey) converge in their approaches to salient cultural issues overriding their partisan-based divisions. Different issue positions in sensitive cultural matters thus carry the potential to create new subtypes of affective polarisation.

Polarisation and youth in Turkey

Turkey has constituted a divided society based on ethnic, cultural, and socio-economic differences the roots of which trace back to the foundational reforms of the 1920s (Aydın-Düzgit 2019). The reforms envisaged the creation of a republican and secular nation-state and society through state-led modernisation strengthening the emerging cleavages of the late Ottoman era. As a result, a kulturkampf came to shape political preferences characterised by divisions among two dominant communities: groups with secular lifestyles vs. conservative groups respecting tradition and religion (Kalaycıoğlu 2012).

Soon after the AKP came to power in 2002, Turkey’s polarisation trajectory took a new turn. The AKP originated from earlier Islamist parties but made a claim to centre-right, catch-all party tradition to represent Turkey’s underrepresented groups. Initial confrontations between the ruling AKP and the secularist establishment (ranging from the military to high judiciary to centre parties) led the party to resort to polarising rhetoric that built on the pre-existing cleavages of ‘religious-secular’, ‘globalist-nationalist’, ‘centre-periphery’, and ‘rich-poor’ (McCoy, Tahmina Rahman & Somer 2018, p. 31). After 2014, polarisation has become ‘pernicious’ with increased negative partisanship and social distance and declining levels of social trust among supporters of different parties (Somer 2019). It is important to note that the process of accelerated polarisation has also led ‘the historical secular-Islamist axis’ to be replaced by the division between the AKP supporters and opponents (Çelik, Bilali & Iqbal 2017).

Recent research on the dimensions of polarisation in Turkey shows that there exist alarming levels of affective polarisation among partisans characterised by social distance, claims of moral superiority, and political intolerance. 72 per cent of research participants do not want to have business relations with the supporters of the opposite party; they describe the supporters of the rival party with negative adjectives such as hypocritical, selfish, and arrogant; and 41 per cent of the participants oppose public demonstrations organised by other party supporters (Erdoğan & Uyan Semerci 2020). Such polarisation even makes it difficult for civil society organisations to remain issue-based and position themselves above polarisation (Özler & Sarkissian 2011) in a society in which even environmentalism is a divided issue (Özler & Obach 2018), and social media platforms such as Twitter are divided (Bulut & Yörük 2017). Recent research on elites in Turkey has even shown the existence of polarisation regarding the existence of polarisation: ‘While pro-governmental elites publicly deny the existence of polarisation in the country, for those in the opposition polarisation is a fundamental problem that needs to be urgently addressed’ (Aydın-Düzgit & Balta 2018, p. 129).

Pernicious polarisation and the democratic erosion accompanying it have been products of causal processes ranging from the emergence of post-truth politics, the creation of a partisan constituency, the AKP’s capture of the state to the personalisation of power, and opposition incapability (Somer 2019). However, institutional factors such as constant elections, a majoritarian political system, and the erosion of democratic institutions have also exacerbated polarisation in recent years (Aydın-Düzgit 2019).

Even though there is a heated discussion on polarisation, there is a gap in the studies reconciling youth and polarisation research. The field of youth studies is still developing and sociological studies on youth in Turkey, mostly based on qualitative research, have been underlining the heterogeneity of the category of youth as well as generational differences. There is indeed a discrepancy in Turkey’s scholarship between the studies of political scientists based on quantitative research, arguing that being young does not matter and that age and generation are not important factors (Erdoğan & Uyan Semerci 2017), and recent qualitative studies, arguing that youth and generation are critical concepts in studying social and political change in Turkey. The works of anthropologist Leyla Neyzi and sociologist Demet Lüküslü, for example, have highlighted the differences between previous generations and the so-called post-1980 generation of Turkey. Neyzi (2001) discussed how, with the post-1980 generation, young people appear as ‘subjects’ rather than ‘objects’, the latter having been the case in previous generations. Lüküslü (2009) addressed the existence of a strong myth of youth in Turkey’s political culture, constructed in a top-down manner and often perceived as a homogeneous category. Furthermore, there is a gap between young people and political parties, and young people do not trust political institutions or political actors, a claim that is also supported by quantitative data (Next Generation Turkey 2017). Young people define political space as corrupt, static, and authoritarian and therefore prefer to stay out of it. As there is little research on young people discussing their lived experiences in a polarised society, we thus aimed to make a modest attempt to fill this gap. We argue, however, that the gap between young people and political parties adds to the complexity of polarisation in Turkey, and even though there is issue-based polarisation among youth, it does not automatically translate into affective polarisation.

Methods

As discussed above, quantitative and qualitative studies on youth in Turkey have produced different answers to how young people react to the polarisation of political culture. We believe it is important to introduce more qualitative studies on polarisation since it has dominantly been discussed based on quantitative data. As argued by Tepe (2013, p. 834), we believe that ‘only a bottom-up review of polarised groups can capture the micro-consequences of polarisation and offer unique insights into the challenges facing democratic processes in divided polities’. Thus, we applied a mixed-method approach in elaborating on the issue. For the present study, we used survey data together with in-depth interviews with young people. The survey enabled us to study youth from a macro perspective, while the qualitative research made it possible to take a micro perspective. As reported by mixed method researchers (Bryman 2007), even though it is difficult to bring together the quantitative and qualitative methodologies, which is why ‘mixed methods data analysis is inherently messy and still largely experimental’ (Bazeley 2012, p. 825), we strongly believe that ‘both quantitative and qualitative approaches, components, data, and/or strategies for analysis are necessary to adequately understand human behaviour, whether individual, group, or societal’ (Bazeley 2012, p. 815).

We drew upon an original public survey that was conducted by the Infakto Research Company in the summer of 2017, with the participation of 1211 young people between 18 and 29 years of age. Participants were recruited through random sampling in a total of 16 city centres and villages under their jurisdiction. On the qualitative side, 38 in-depth interviews were conducted with young people in June – August 2017. All of the interviews were semi-structured, tape-recorded, transcribed verbatim, and anonymised. Of those interview participants, again between 18 and 29 years of age, 17 were female and 21 were male, and 18 identified as pious, while 20 identified as secular. We contacted our interviewees through different points of entry (such as associations, foundations, initiatives, platforms, and political parties) into the field and then used the snowball technique to reach out to different participants. We wished to understand whether activism in a political party or organisation fosters the development of polarised attitudes. In that sense, there was a purposive sample aiming to achieve diversity in terms of political and cultural affiliation to the secular/religious divide in Turkey. The interviewees were, for that reason, not representative.

It is important to highlight that the fieldwork was conducted at a time of heightened polarisation in Turkey, which provided both opportunities and limitations for the research design. The survey and in-depth interviews were conducted shortly after a referendum for the transition to a presidential system, during which pro-government and opposition constituencies revealed highly contrasting opinions about presidentialism. Furthermore, during the campaign process, the ruling party representatives frequently accused the opposition forces of aligning with terrorist organisations which further deepened polarisation in the political arena. Therefore, the timing of the research provided a unique context to explore the extent and character of polarisation among youth. However, as research shows, elections tend to strengthen partisanship, which, in turn, reinforces mass polarisation (Hernandez, Anduiza & Rico 2020). Therefore, it is important to acknowledge that our findings might have revealed higher than usual levels of polarisation among youth due to the timing of the research.

Another limitation of the research design relates to the analysis of quantitative data. The quantitative analysis only reflects frequency distribution on relevant themes and does not draw upon robust regression models prevalent in some studies employing the mixed methods approach. We made the conscious choice to exclude such statistical inference since we utilised quantitative data to present the macro trends of polarisation and focused on qualitative data to explore the micro patterns, mechanisms, and interpretations of polarisation among youth. It is important to note that even though different sources of data confirmed each other for most of the themes under analysis, inconsistencies in some issues were also striking and underlined the saliency of cross-checking. For example, the survey data revealed that the majority of young people considered that wearing a headscarf was a personal freedom. However, the secular participants of the in-depth interviews raised concerns about headscarved women employed in the security and legal systems.

Research findings

This research demonstrated that being young in Turkey interacts with the dynamics of polarisation in complicated ways. On the one hand, similar to older cohorts, high levels of issue-based polarisation exist among youth. Young people diverge in their interpretations of recent critical events in politics as well as in their opinions about cultural issues pertaining to religious and secular lifestyle performances. One important finding on issue-based polarisation was that while partisanship drives polarisation in the views about recent political events, sociocultural identities of being pious or secular shape differences in cultural issues overriding partisan attachments. On the other hand, we found weaker indicators of affective polarisation among youth. Young people value establishing and maintaining friendships and workplace relationships with peers from diverse political and cultural backgrounds, and they are less likely to attribute negative traits to out-groups. Moreover, we also observed that young people, regardless of their partisan and cultural identities, share common grievances and anxieties originating from experiences of being young in Turkey that carry the potential to unite youth around common political aspirations. In this section of the article, we analysed the survey and interview data to highlight the complicated character of (de)polarisation among Turkey’s youth.

Areas of polarisation among youth in Turkey

The existing research on polarisation in Turkey underlines the growing divisions among the supporters of the ruling party and the opposition in their opinions about certain political events in the last decade. Those events are the ones that became heavily politicised and generated critical repercussions for Turkish politics. For example, Erdoğan and Uyan Semerci (2018) showed that partisanship played a critical role in shaping public opinions about the large-scale anti-government uprising in the summer of 2013 known as the Gezi Park protests. While 81 per cent of the supporters of the ruling AKP considered the Gezi Park protests to have been incited by foreign powers to overthrow the government, 84 per cent of voters for the secular, centre-left main opposition party, the CHP (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi – Republican People’s Party), identified the protests as actions of freedom of expression for peacefully voicing mass discontent with certain government policies (p. 120). Similarly, research conducted in 2019 revealed that voters for the ruling party identified the participants of the Gezi Park protests as being among the groups that they felt most distant from, while they expressed highly positive views about people who took to the streets in support of the government against the 2016 coup attempt (KONDA Research and Consultancy 2019, p. 67).

Partisanship also shaped the level of support for the transition to a presidential system, which was an initiative of the ruling party put into effect through a public referendum in 2017, and public perceptions of the performance of presidentialism. In a survey conducted two years before the referendum, support for presidentialism was measured at 54 per cent among AKP partisans, while it only ranged from nine per cent to 13 per cent among partisans of opposition parties (Aytaç, Çarkoğlu & Yıldırım 2017, p. 8). Immediately after the referendum, 84 per cent of the supporters of the ruling party stated that presidentialism would be good for Turkey’s future, while only five per cent of the CHP voters expressed faith in its efficiency (Erdoğan & Uyan Semerci 2018, p. 121).

Parallel to these findings, our research revealed that young people are as polarised as other age groups in their opinions about anti-government protests, the 2016 coup attempt, and the transition to a presidential system. When the survey participants were asked whether they approved of people organising street protests, 64 per cent of young AKP supporters answered that they ‘do not approve at all’ or ‘do not approve’. However, 81.9 per cent and 69.8 per cent of participating CHP and HDP (Halkların Demokratik Partisi – Peoples’ Democratic Party) supporters, respectively, replied that they considered street protests to be legitimate. During the interviews, we specifically asked for the opinions of participants regarding the Gezi Park protests. Interviewees who supported the ruling party echoed the government’s discourse on the protests, referring to the uprising as a provocative act intended to overthrow the government. Two teenagers who stated that they would vote for the ruling AKP in the next elections expressed highly negative views about the Gezi Park protests:

When I think about Gezi, I feel like most of it was provocation. It was done to disturb the internal peace of the country. It was like what FETÖ [the Fethullah terrorist organisation, referring to the supporters of the religious community that attempted a coup against the AKP government in 2016], Atatürkist¹ people, or the HDP supporters² try to do these days. (GN7, female, 18 years old, high school graduate, wants to study law at university)

The Gezi events were not just about a few trees or a forest.³ They were planned ahead. I mean, they were planned to disturb the government. It emerged out of envy [of the opposition about good government performance]. (GN10, male, 19 years old, NEET not in education/employment/training)

While the AKP partisan youth condemned the protests and essentially declared them to be illegitimate, young people voting for the CHP defended and affirmed the anti-government uprising:

I considered Gezi as a political awakening. Unity and cooperation for defending trees took a different form. It created hope among youth. I mean, many people were unhappy about the system, and Gezi turned into an open protest against the status quo. (GY10, male, 25 years old, university graduate, unemployed)

Issue-based polarisation among young people was also evident in their opinions about the 2016 coup attempt. Interview participants who supported the AKP, and especially male participants, stated that they took to the streets to stand against the coup attempt. An AKP Youth Branch activist exalted the pro-government civilians, who resisted the coup attempt on the streets while harshly criticising the supporters of the opposition:

Those who were allegedly selling their votes in return for pasta were on the streets against the coup plotters, while those who had accused them with such derogatory language for years rushed to gas stations to buy pasta.

Such polarising language adopted by the young partisans of the AKP largely echoed the AKP leadership’s discourse on the night of the coup attempt. The opinions of the anti-government youth about the coup attempt, on the other hand, were reminiscent of the opposition parties’ interpretations of events. Young opposition supporters used the word ‘theatre’ to describe the coup attempt; they thought that the government had organised the events on its own initiative to consolidate power and eliminate political rivals. The practices applied during the state of emergency declared after the coup attempt further aggravated mass polarisation on the issue, which was also observable in the views of the young people supporting rival parties. In the survey, the participants were asked about the extent to which they considered the removal of some public employees, allegedly linked to terrorist organisations, from their jobs through decree laws as fair. In response, 51.5 per cent of the AKP supporters expressed their support of that practice, while only 7.3 per cent of the CHP supporters and 10.3 per cent of the HDP supporters found it fair.

The transition to a presidential system and the potential capacity of presidentialism for resolving Turkey’s problems constituted another area of issue-based polarisation among the supporters of the ruling party and the opposition. According to our survey, while 86.6 per cent of young AKP supporters voted ‘yes’ in the referendum for the transition to a presidential system, 87.6 per cent of the CHP supporters and 64.5 per cent of the HDP supporters voted ‘no’. In line with these levels of support, 69 per cent of young AKP supporters stated that the new presidential system would be successful in resolving Turkey’s problems, while only 13.9 per cent of young CHP voters and 12 per cent of young HDP voters predicted that presidentialism would be successful. The interview narratives further revealed the irreconcilable attitudes of young people on this issue. While one AKP supporter advocated for the presidential system solely based on his trust and love for President Erdoğan, an anti-government interviewee respectively believed in the efficiency of American-type presidentialism but criticised the current system in Turkey based on the extensive powers granted to President Erdoğan:

I support the presidential system. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan never deceived this nation, he has always kept his promises. That’s why we support him and the presidential system. (GN10, male, 19 years old, NEET, thinking of voting for the AKP in the next elections)

I think presidentialism might be good for Turkey, but not the kind the AKP government brought in … It should be more like the one in the US. The judiciary should be totally independent. But in the current presidential system, we have, ten of the judges in the Constitutional Court are appointed by the president. That’s nonsense. Who will judge the president when it’s needed? His own men will judge him? The president also has the power to dissolve the parliament. Such powers are granted to the president in our system. (EK2, male, 22 years old, university graduate, employed, did not reveal his party preference but self-identified as Atatürkist)

Partisanship shapes young people’ s perceptions of recent critical events in Turkish politics and polarises them into opposing camps. Our survey and interview data showed that issue-based polarisation on cultural matters also persists among Turkish youth. Young people have polarising attitudes about religious attire, the consumption of alcohol in public spaces, and LGBT+ rights. However, the sources of polarisation along cultural lines lie not in partisanship but rather in sociocultural identity. Specifically, religious and secular identities tend to shape the attitudes of youth about controversial cultural matters. Some pious young people, for example, despite being highly critical of the ruling party, converged with the AKP partisans in their reactions to certain secular lifestyle performances. Similarly, young people self-identifying as secular tended to not approve of certain religious freedoms. Considering recent piety-affirming gestures from secular opposition parties to appeal to devout electorates,⁴ the attitudes of secular young people about religious issues reflected the vicissitudes of a society long polarised on a religious-secular axis.

To begin, our survey data showed that Turkey’s notorious ‘headscarf problem’,⁵ which has triggered polarisation of both religious and secular elites and the general public since the early 1990s, is not a divisive issue among young people. When we asked the survey participants the extent to which they were disturbed by women wearing headscarves, 94.9 per cent replied that women wearing headscarves did not disturb them. To better understand the attitudes of young people who self-identify as secular about religious styles of dress, we discussed the issue during in-depth interviews as well. The narratives of the participating secular youth revealed that even though they defended the choice to wear a headscarf as personal freedom and acknowledged that there should be no further interference with headscarves, they expressed disdain for other types of religious dress, such as burkas for women and traditional Islamist gowns for men:

GY8: I met veiled people pretty late in life. I was 17 or 18 years old when I first met a veiled person. That’s why, I mean, women with headscarves are not very frightening to me, but I’m somehow scared of women wearing burkas. It’s like a phobia. I’m guarded against overtly veiled, burka-wearing people or those putting on fez-like hats [i.e. traditional Islamist hats for men].

Researcher: What kind of a fear is that?

GY8: It’s like they can do anything. If a person tries to cover their body that much, there must be something wrong with them. I mean, if I can wear non-veiled outfits, they should also be able to get dressed in a veiled form – yes, I know that. But this is like a personal fear (GY8, female, 23 years old, university graduate, unemployed).

GY8’s complicated feelings about people wearing traditional Islamist attire, vacillating between the idea that it is a personal freedom to dress like that and feelings of being threatened, were also observable in the narratives of the secular youth about police, prosecutors, and judges who wear headscarves.

Researcher: How do you feel about police officers with headscarves?

OG2: I try to feel optimistic about it, but it’s totally against my worldview. From a human rights perspective, it’s rational to think that they could be police officers, but my gut feeling says the opposite (OG2, female, 23 years old, university student, self-identified as Atatürkist).

The qualitative data that we drew upon also revealed that similar to secular youth who navigate between politically correct and illiberal attitudes about Islamist styles of dress, young people who self-identify as pious do not view certain secular lifestyle performances as acceptable, especially if those secular practices are visible in the public sphere. For example, when we asked pious interviewees about their opinions on the removal of alcohol service from municipality-run restaurants in İstanbul, a controversial policy put into effect by the previous AKP-run local government, they explained that they found the policy to be appropriate:

Based on my lifestyle, I don’t even purchase water from shops selling alcohol. For sure, everyone leads their lives according to their own choices, but alcohol-drinking people should not be everywhere. I mean, some people do not prefer it [the drinking of alcohol]. If we respect their choices, they should be respectful of our choices, as well. (GN3, female, 29 years old, middle school graduate, housewife)

I would be disturbed if they served alcohol in municipality-run restaurants. Alcohol should not exist in public places like that. It’s not just because alcohol consumption is forbidden in Islam. I’m sorry, but they should at least not drink there. A person drinking alcohol might be disturbing for families spending time in those restaurants. (GN9, male, 28 years old, university graduate, teacher)

The reactions of pious youth to alcohol consumption in public spaces were manifested as they imagined religious identity and its norms to constitute the hegemonic form of lifestyle performances belonging to the majority. Such secular life choices, they felt, should be practiced in the private sphere or isolated places where they will be non-visible and non-disturbing to pious people.

LGBT+ rights and the public visibility of LGBT+ individuals also emerge as polarised issues among young people. While educated secular youth particularly tend to affirm LGBT+ identities and rights, pious young people hold negative views. A pious young interviewee justified her dislike of LGBT+ individuals based on Islamist references:

Researcher: Would you become friends with a gay person?

GN7: I don’t think so. We have a straightforward verse in the Quran … It says their punishment is to stay locked up at home. The religion puts forth a strict statement about them.

Researcher: Do you feel disturbed when gay people are visible in society?

GN7: I would like to say it’s their own issue, but in my heart, I’m not comfortable with that. When they’re visible, they set examples. Being gay should not be so overtly public. That they can organise rallies in Taksim or have a day of their own, that’s very extreme to me. Many kids are seeing them. Kids may want to emulate them, they may wish to look like them, that is very problematic (GN7, female, 18 years old, high school graduate, wants to study law at university).

Our research was designed to focus on the complex character of polarisation in Turkey through a case study of young people. Even though young people reveal certain forms of resistance against the politics of polarisation, as the next section will discuss, it cannot be denied that there are strong political and sociocultural cleavages in Turkey that create a divided youth population. Accordingly, we found that just as party identities generate issue-based polarisation among youth, cultural identities of being pious or secular foster conflicting attitudes about cultural matters. As Next Generation Turkey (2017) also highlights, it is possible to see the impact of identities on youth:

Conservative youth identify strongly with a religious code; nationalist young people emphasise the indivisible integrity of the country and the nation; young people with secular lifestyles are passionate about individual rights and freedoms; and Kurdish and other minority groups of youth talk about their ties with their own cultures (p. 59).

Areas of depolarisation: resisting affective polarisation, common fears of heightened polarisation, and common problems and anxieties

Despite the existence of important areas of polarisation discussed above, the youth population is still not completely polarised. There are also areas that political polarisation seems incapable of infiltrating. Placing value on having friends with different political views or from different ‘camps’, for example, constitutes one of the most important ways in which young people in Turkey resist affective polarisation. With our survey, we aimed to learn whether the participants’ friends shared their political views. Only 3.9 per cent responded that ‘all of them’ shared the same political views, while 41.6 per cent responded ‘most of them’ and 36 per cent responded ‘half of them’. Similarly, the interviewed young people stated that their friends had a wide range of political views and political views were not important factors for friendship. For example, GN6, a 20-year-old university student who self-identified as a religious person, proudly stated that he had friends and relatives with various political views:

GN6: I have friends [with different political views], the university environment sort of enables that. I search for a certain harmony, but that doesn’t mean … Friendship, I believe, is about asking similar questions in life. I don’t mean that [my friends] have to think like me, they just need to ask the same questions. Or at least friends need to value me, and I value that person, and it’s not about benefits. This is a necessity for creating friendships. I look at the issue this way.

Researcher: Do you have friends with different political views?

GN6: Yes, I do. I have Islamist friends, I have socialist friends, and homosexual friends (GN6, male, 20 years old, university student).

The interviewed young people also stressed that they do not let politics affect their emotional ties and friendships. They clearly stated that as a tactic, in reference to De Certeau (1984), for avoiding political conflicts, they choose not to talk about politics with their friends. Michel de Certeau referred to war terminology and distinguished a ‘tactic’ from a ‘strategy’, underlining the idea that a tactic cannot be defined as having ‘the options of planning general strategy and viewing the adversary within a distinct, visible, and objectifiable space’. Rather, tactics, as ‘an art of the weak’, utilise the cracks in the system (De Certeau 1984, p. 37). As discussed in previous research (Lüküslü 2013), young people choose the tactic of avoiding conflicts and not letting politics invade their everyday lives by not talking about it:

ZN4: In my social environment, there are various kinds of people, and I have friends from every political tendency – leftist, rightist, and so on. That’s why I no longer speak about or discuss [politics] with them because nobody changes their [political] views and discussions about politics become quite annoying after a while.

Researcher: I see.

ZN4: There’s a saying by Aristotle: ‘Don’t do politics with your loved ones. As the politicians continue on their routes, you’ll find yourself alienated from your loved ones. I think politics should be done by politicians. I don’t see politics as something that can be done by everyone. Everybody has an opinion about something and has a reason for thinking like that. That’s why I keep quiet in these environments (ZN4, male, 23 years old, university student).

Besides friendships, the workplace was also defined as a place that polarisation should not infiltrate. In our survey, young people were asked about their preferences for the selection of candidate employees in the workplace and their options were ‘A candidate who shares the same lifestyle’ or ‘Another candidate’. In response, 57.2 per cent of the participating young people stated that they could have chosen both answers, which underlines that they do not attribute much importance to shared lifestyles in the workplace. When the same question was asked to learn whether they would prefer a candidate who voted for the same political party or not, 70 per cent of the participants stated that they could also choose a candidate voting for a different political party. Thus, we see that being voters for the same political party was not perceived as a very important factor in the workplace. Similarly, in our in-depth interviews, we observed that young people tried to situate the workplace as a neutral space removed from all political tensions and conflicts.

One of the identifying features of affective polarisation is the attribution of negative traits to out-groups (Iyengar, Sood & Lelkes 2012). However, our survey data revealed that young people in Turkey try to avoid prejudices regarding people who do not share the same cultural universe. When we asked our survey participants whether a connection exists between being religious and being moral, 79.9 per cent of the young AKP supporters stated that non-religious people could also be inherently moral.

Young people share common experiences regarding perceptions of social media, as well. Young people in Turkey use new information technologies and social media extensively (Next Generation Turkey 2017, pp. 20–22). Even though cyberspace is perceived as a polarised space in Turkey (Binark et al. 2015; Bulut & Yörük 2017), the majority of young people in our survey stated that they did not use Twitter (66.5 per cent) or Facebook (69.6 per cent) to express their political views. In our in-depth interviews, we observed that the participants were critical of the hate speech of trolls and the polarisation of cyberspace.

In these various examples, a willingness to move beyond polarisation and the resulting stigmatisation of conventional or traditional politics can be seen. Young people are tired of the stigmatising discourses of political actors and institutions that refer to ‘enemies’ and ‘traitors’ (Bozarslan 2001), and they try to position themselves above such political debates and create peaceful atmospheres in their friendships, their workplaces, and cyberspace.

In addition to these spaces of depolarisation, there are also important common problems and shared values that unite youth in Turkey. Being young in a society with chronic education and employment problems (Çelik & Lüküslü 2018) seems to trouble young people from different groups deeply. There are common problems that young people complain about, such as exam stress, unemployment, and anxieties about finding decent jobs and difficult working conditions. Nepotism, the corrupt nature of employment in the public sector, and related injustices are also problems that are shared widely among young people. For a majority of young people in Turkey, a job in the public sector is seen as a symbol of security and relatively decent working conditions (Istanpol 2020), and is very much desired, but getting there necessitates navigating corrupt nepotistic networks. In our research, we observed that young people often expressed their anger towards this mechanism. It was commonly stated by the participants that being young in Turkey is difficult, stressful, and full of anxiety for the future.

Apart from these ‘material’ anxieties, young people also seem to be very worried about their country, as 75.9 per cent of our participants stated that they were worried about restrictions on people’s liberties. It is thus possible to argue that liberty is an important shared value and that young people complain about its absence. Young women were particularly worried about restrictions on their liberties and complained of gender discrimination and inequality.

Discussion and conclusion

Gorman (2018) questioned the myth of the secular-Islamist divide in Muslim politics and argued, based on evidence from Tunisia, that ‘opinions about the appropriateness of religious actors, institutions, and values in politics represent an important source of social division in majority-Muslim societies, but that this division is not as substantive as previous scholarship suggests’ (Gorman 2018, p. 146). Furthermore, the author stated that ‘differences in political attitudes are limited to relatively few issue areas and that self-identified secularists and Islamists appropriate elements of their opponents’ ideologies’ (Gorman 2018, p. 147).

Our findings indicated a similarly complicated picture regarding the extent and character of polarisation among Turkey’s youth. First of all, high levels of issue-based polarisation were found. Supporters of the ruling powers and the opposition diverged in their interpretations of contemporary political events, namely the Gezi Park protests of 2013, the 2016 coup attempt, and the transition to a presidential system, leading them to advocate conflicting political visions for Turkey’s future. It was also found that young people were divided on cultural issues such as the consumption of alcohol in public spaces, LGBT+ rights, and religious freedoms. Rather than partisan identities, however, sociocultural cleavages in terms of being religious or secular formed the basis of polarisation on cultural issues. Moreover, despite the prevalence of issue-based polarisation, we saw that young people in Turkey resist affective polarisation and are concerned about the escalation of mass polarisation in Turkey into a more pernicious form. The participants placed high value on establishing and sustaining friendships with peers from different partisan and cultural backgrounds, and they were pioneers in peaceful coexistence at school and in the workplace. They also experienced a set of common challenges in the transition to adulthood including unemployment, diminishing welfare services, and concerns about the lack of meritocracy in employment, which might potentially unite them around a single political imagery.

The findings of this research contribute to the literature on polarisation in Turkey and beyond in several ways. First, this study provides evidence for the complex interplay of affective and issue-based polarisation. It shows that partisanship and sociocultural identities have the potential to create different types of issue-based polarisation. Regardless of their partisan identities, pious and secular youth diverge in their opinions about critical cultural issues. Second, it reveals that affective polarisation is not a sine qua non of contemporary mass polarisation. Young people in Turkey resist and disrupt the patterns of social and emotional distance and hostility in an increasingly polarised society. However, this research is only a humble one and further studies are needed to explore whether such resistance is driven by life cycle or generational effects.

This study offers important implications about the relationship between polarisation and democratic resilience as well. Youth resistance to affective polarisation, the most pervasive form of contemporary polarisation, with highly negative effects on democratic coexistence, shows the limits of polarisation as a political strategy in the hands of elite opponents. However, the potential of sociocultural identities producing issue-based polarisation in critical cultural matters in ways that override partisanship-based divisions, provides polarising political entrepreneurs ample opportunities to politicise cultural cleavages for political gains. Therefore, the case of Turkey manifests that polarisation will continue to occupy a central place in political debates in the years to come and will be decisive in the future of democracy.

Acknowledgments

This research was conducted for TÜSES (Türkiye Sosyal Ekonomik Siyasal Araştırmalar Vakfı (Social, Economic, and Political Research Foundation of Turkey) and funded by Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Turkey. We greatly appreciate the contributions of Prof. Yüksel Taşkın, who was one of the principal investigators during the field research and the initial analysis of the data. We thank our research participants for candidly sharing their experiences and ideas with us. Without the excellent research assistance of Güneş Akkurt, Gaye Polat, Cemal Taşpınar, Zeyno Keçecioğlu, and Yunus Kaplan, this research would not have been possible. We also thank South European Society and Politics editors and anonymous referees for their insightful suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Turkey.

Notes on contributors

Begüm Uzun

Begüm Uzun is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science and International Relations of MEF University, Istanbul, Turkey. She received her PhD in Political Science from the University of Toronto in 2019. She has a BA and MA in Political Science and International Relations from Marmara University and Boğaziçi University, respectively. Dr. Uzun’s research interests include youth political participation, state-society relations, social movements, and Turkish politics. Before beginning to teach at MEF University, she taught courses at the University of Toronto and Marmara University

Demet Lüküslü

Demet Lüküslü is a Professor of Sociology at Yeditepe University, and 2023/24 Mercator Istanbul Policy Center Fellow at Sabancı University, Turkey. She received her PhD in Sociology from Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, France in 2005. She has expertise in qualitative research and is particularly interested in youth studies, social movements, and sociology of everyday life and gender studies. She recently worked on an edited book project (with Batsleer & Rowley) (2022) Young People, Radical Democracy and Community Development (Policy Press). She has published various book chapters and journal articles in both English and Turkish.

Notes

1. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk is the founder of the secular, republican Turkey. Being an Atatürkist is a political identity long associated with secular Turkish opposition in Turkey.

2. The ruling AKP and its electoral ally MHP (Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi – Nationalist Action Party) have long accused the pro-Kurdish, left-wing HDP of supporting terrorism. Those accusations have exacerbated polarisation along ethnic lines.

3. The Gezi Park protests started as a reaction against the demolition of Istanbul’s historical Gezi Park as part of an urban regeneration project.

4. For example, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, then the main opposition party leader, made an ‘unexpected’ call in early October 2022 to pass legislation guaranteeing the right of women to wear headscarves, which brought Turkey’s long-debated headscarf issue back onto the political agenda (Devrenoglu & Butler 2022).

5. Restrictions were put into effect by the secularist civil-military establishment during the 1990s on wearing headscarves in schools, universities, and public-sector employment. The ruling AKP gradually removed all headscarf-related restrictions but has kept past headscarf bans on the political agenda, making the issue an important discursive part of its politics of polarisation.