Cengiz Erisen

Emotions as a Determinant in Turkish Political Behavior

This 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 Erdoğans performance. This article aims to stimulate further research in the literature on the potential effects of emotions in Turkish political behavior.

Strategic Voting and Coordination Problems in Proportional Systems: An Experimental Study

We 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.

An assessment on the behavioral foundations of electoral decisions in the 2015 Turkish general elections

ABSTRACT Turkish 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.

The Political Psychology of Turkish Political Behavior: Introduction by the Special Issue Editor

This special issue aims to contribute to Turkish politics literature through a novel, unexplored aspect of Turkish political behavior. Primarily motivated by behavioral theories, political psychology offers a key perspective to explore and disentangle the multifactorial and multidimensional nature of Turkish political behavior. This introduction gives an account of the general motivation behind this special issue by briefly discussing the goals of this special issue, providing a brief history of the political psychology discipline, introducing the articles in this special issue, and outlining political psychology-related work in Turkey. The article concludes by presenting the acknowledgements.

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

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.

Research Methods in Political Psychology

Given 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.

Exploring the invocation of emotion in presidential speeches

Scholars 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.

Strategic Voting and Personality Traits

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.