Moving ‘East’ or ‘West’?

ABSTRACT

In light of debates over the compatibility of Islam and democracy, their importance in the EU candidate state of Turkey which has been led by the religious-based Justice and Development Party (JDP) since 2002, and the paucity of research examining liberal-democratic value change, we examine liberal-democratic value change and its sources in Turkey between 2000 and 2008. The results of our descriptive, factor, and multivariate analyses of European and World Values Survey data (2000, 2001, 2007, and 2008) indicate that despite Huntington's (1996) and Turkish secularists' pessimism, people in Turkey have not adopted more politically religious values during this time. However, personal expressions of religiosity are on the rise, and they are intertwined with politically religious values to some extent. People in Turkey have generally adopted less politically authoritarian values, but they are more supportive of military rule in 2008 than before the JDP came to power. Ethnic tolerance peaked in 2007 but declined below its 2001 level in 2008. While human development theory helps to explain these trends and values, the case of Turkey reveals that other, more political factors –such as nationalism –may counteract liberal-democratic value change. The results are suggestive of a political realignment in Turkey that transcends a secular-religious divide. They further suggest that Turkey is moving neither ‘East’ nor ‘West’; rather, it is very much moving in its own direction.

Key words:

• Muslim
• democratization
• development
• modernization
• values
• enlargement

Acknowledgements

A previous version of this paper was presented at the Koç University Social Science Seminar (January, 2010). The second authors, whose names are in alphabetical order, were generously funded by Koç University during portions of this project. We thank the European Societies editor and reviewers, as well as Andrew Fullerton and Zeynep Mirza for their very helpful comments on previous versions of this paper. We also gratefully acknowledge the research assistance by Nazmiye Altındaş, Meaghan Flanigan, Cansu Öktem, and Lan Truong.

Notes

¹ Because previous research has found that Turkey departs from EU states in terms of these values (Dixon 2008) and comparable measures of democratic evaluations are not available, we limit our focus to these values.

² These are the most recent available years available in the EVS/WVS at this time. An earlier wave is also available, but it is not representative of Turkey due to violence in the East of Turkey (see Dixon 2008).

³ The six arrows of Kemalism are nationalism, republicanism, populism, revolutionism/reformism, statism, and secularism (Zürcher 2004: 181–2), but see below for the meaning of secularism in the Turkish context.

⁴ We thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.

⁵ Turkish laicism is different from traditional Western secularism because the state officially controls religion in the former model, while there is an official separation of religion and state in the latter (Shankland 1999).

⁶ Some of the items concerning the separation of religion and state were not asked in more than two waves/years, so we use the only item asked across all of the waves as well as an additional item asked in three waves.

⁷ In order to make the income measure comparable across surveys, we used the midpoints of the income categories (minus the zeros of Turkey's previous currency) and converted them into 2008 inflation-adjusted TL (Turkish lira) (World Bank 2011).

⁸ Our supplementary ordered logit models indicated that our measures of religiosity and national identity generally increased during the time period examined.

⁹ By ordered logit, we mean proportional odds models. We also ran partial proportional odds models for these items, and the omnibus Brant test revealed that the parallel regression assumption was not violated in the final models (χ²=18.44, p=0.24 and χ²=26.25, p=0.20, respectively).

¹⁰ We thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.

¹¹ In our supplementary analyses using ordered logit models for each item, we found that the sources of these values were substantively similar, except that the importance of God was a less consistent predictor of these values and that national identity was not associated with expert leadership.

¹² Our separate logit analyses of each item in this scale revealed that their sources were substantively similar.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jeffrey C. Dixon

Jeffrey C. Dixon is an assistant professor of Sociology at the College of the Holy Cross in the US.

Yetkin Borlu

Yetkin Borlu is a PhD student in the Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology at The Pennsylvania State University in the US.

Duygu Kasdoğan

Ms. Duygu Kasdoğan is a PhD student in Science and Technology Studies at York University in Canada.