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Publication Metadata only An experimental investigation of voter myopia in economic evaluations(Elsevier Sci Ltd, 2021) Department of International Relations; Aytaç, Selim Erdem; Faculty Member; Department of International Relations; College of Administrative Sciences and Economics; 224278A prevalent assumption in the economic voting literature is that voters' retrospective evaluations are based on very recent outcomes only, that is, they are myopic. I test this assumption by drawing on a population based survey experiment from Turkey. Turkey presents a good opportunity to explore voters' time horizons for economic voting: the long tenure of the same single-party government entailed periods of both good and poor performance, and its overall record to date has been better than its immediate predecessors. I find that voters can provide divergent assessments of incumbent's performance in managing the economy over different time periods that are in line with the country's macroeconomic trajectory. Moreover, voters' evaluations of the incumbent's performance during its entire tenure have a stronger effect on economic vote than their shorter term evaluations, defying voter myopia. I provide evidence that long-term outcomes might weigh heavier in voters' considerations than commonly assumed.Publication Metadata only Born in the USA: citizenship acquisition and transnational mothering in Turkey(Routledge Journals, Taylor & Francis Ltd, 2017) Balta, Evren; Department of International Relations; Olcay, Özlem Altan; Faculty Member; Department of International Relations; College of Administrative Sciences and Economics; 104197This article explores the practice of giving birth in the U.S. for the purpose of obtaining U.S. citizenship for the newborn children, among upper and upper-middle class mothers who otherwise are permanently located in Turkey. Focusing on their motivations, anxieties and practices, we situate our analysis with respect to discussions of intensive mothering, transnational motherhood and multi-layered meanings of citizenship. We suggest that the motivations women have for traveling to and staying in the U.S. in the later stages of their pregnancy reveal a new terrain of intensive mothering, tied to locally specific perceptions of future unpredictability and restrictions on individual choice. This particular discourse of intensive mothering involves the promotion of individualistic-decision-making and individualized efforts to control macro-processes, and reveals how citizenship acquisition for the children reproduces and disguises inequalities at the transnational level. Yet, this is also an intensely emotional process, not only indicative of the pressures on mothers, but also women's multilayered conflicts of belonging and identity across spaces and scales of citizenship.Publication Open Access Class and passports: transnational strategies of distinction in Turkey(Sage, 2016) Balta, Evren; Department of International Relations; Olcay, Özlem Altan; Faculty Member; Department of International Relations; College of Administrative Sciences and EconomicsThis article analyses the process whereby members of new classes in Turkey mobilize their resources so that their children receive US citizenship at birth. Following the actors' self-perceptions and motivations, we argue that US citizenship acquisition is a new capital accumulation strategy, aimed to forestall against risks in intergenerational transmission of class privileges. With this article, we aim to contribute to cultural class studies in the following ways: we suggest that the unpredictable nature of classification struggles becomes more evident in contexts where transition to neoliberalism is accompanied by dramatic political shifts. We situate the desire for US citizenship within class anxieties in Turkey, informed by historical meanings attached to the binary of the West' versus the East'. Finally, we break down the boundaries between different country-cases by drawing on citizenship as capital, rather than as a backdrop that actors share. We explain the new ways in which class distinction strategies are transnationalized in the contemporary period.Publication Open Access Does natural gas fuel civil war? rethinking energy security, international relations, and fossil-fuel conflict(Elsevier, 2020) Department of International Relations; N/A; Akça, Belgin San; Yılmaz, Şuhnaz Özbağcı; Mehmetoğlu, Seda Duygu Sever; Faculty Member; Department of International Relations; College of Administrative Sciences and Economics; Graduate School of Social Sciences and Humanities; 107754; 46805; N/AThis article advances theoretical and empirical knowledge at the nexus of energy politics and conflict intervention by analyzing the complex dynamics connecting energy resources, civil war, and outside state support of rebel groups. It focuses on the role of global energy supply competition in states’ decision to support armed groups that are involved in conflicts in other states. Further, this study enhances the extant research that focuses primarily on the resource wealth of conflict-ridden states by analyzing the effect of the interveners' resource wealth on their sponsorship of foreign non-state armed groups. This study identifies two causal paths linking energy resources, specifically natural gas, to state support of rebels by building on outside state supporters’ motives for: (1) competition over supply to global markets; and (2) secure access to resources and supply routes. The empirical section includes a large-N analysis on original data covering 454 rebel groups and their state supporters and a detailed case study of the Russian intervention in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine.Publication Open Access Effectiveness of incumbent's strategic communication during economic crisis under electoral authoritarianism: evidence from Turkey(Cambridge University Press (CUP), 2021) Department of International Relations; Aytaç, Selim Erdem; Faculty Member; Department of International Relations; College of Administrative Sciences and Economics; 224278To minimize damage to their popularity during economic downturns, rulers in electoral autocracies can draw on their propaganda advantage to keep the economy off the political agenda or shift the blame to other actors. How successful are these strategies in swaying citizens' views? While electoral autocrats frequently resort to these strategies, there is surprisingly little evidence about their effectiveness. To address this gap, I took advantage of the recent economic crisis in Turkey and deployed a population-based survey experiment that mimicked incumbent's use of these strategies. I find that incumbent's efforts of shifting the blame fail to elicit intended effects among large parts of the electorate. In contrast, changing the political agenda away from the economy to an issue area that is more favorable for the incumbent is more effective for shoring up popular support. These findings contribute to our understanding of the mechanisms that help sustain electoral authoritarianism.Publication Open Access Ethnicity and religiosity-based prejudice in Turkey: evidence from a survey experiment(Sage, 2017) Department of International Relations; Aytaç, Selim Erdem; Çarkoğlu, Ali; Faculty Member; Faculty Member; Department of International Relations; College of Administrative Sciences and Economics; 224278; 125588Threat perceptions and prejudice underlie a large number of intergroup conflicts. In this article we explore prejudicial attitudes in Turkey regarding ethnic Kurdish and devout Muslim religious identities as opposed to Turkish and less observant, secular identities. Utilizing a population-based survey experiment, we use vignettes about a hypothetical family as a neighbour, with randomized ethnicity and religiosity-related cues. We find evidence for prejudice against Kurdish ethnicity, especially among older, lowly-educated and economically dissatisfied individuals. The level of prejudice against Kurds does not seem to be related to the relative size of the Kurdish population in the local population. We do not observe prejudice against devout Muslim or less observant, secular identities. Our findings indicate that prejudice against Kurds in Turkey does not have a sui generis nature. The lack of prejudice across the religiosity dimension suggests that major socio-political cleavages do not necessarily affect intergroup attitudes.Publication Open Access Evolutionary multiobjective feature selection for sentiment analysis(Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), 2021) Pelin Angın; Deniz, Ayça; Department of International Relations; Angın, Merih; Faculty Member; Department of International Relations; College of Administrative Sciences and Economics; 308500Sentiment analysis is one of the prominent research areas in data mining and knowledge discovery, which has proven to be an effective technique for monitoring public opinion. The big data era with a high volume of data generated by a variety of sources has provided enhanced opportunities for utilizing sentiment analysis in various domains. In order to take best advantage of the high volume of data for accurate sentiment analysis, it is essential to clean the data before the analysis, as irrelevant or redundant data will hinder extracting valuable information. In this paper, we propose a hybrid feature selection algorithm to improve the performance of sentiment analysis tasks. Our proposed sentiment analysis approach builds a binary classification model based on two feature selection techniques: an entropy-based metric and an evolutionary algorithm. We have performed comprehensive experiments in two different domains using a benchmark dataset, Stanford Sentiment Treebank, and a real-world dataset we have created based on World Health Organization (WHO) public speeches regarding COVID-19. The proposed feature selection model is shown to achieve significant performance improvements in both datasets, increasing classification accuracy for all utilized machine learning and text representation technique combinations. Moreover, it achieves over 70% reduction in feature size, which provides efficiency in computation time and space.Publication Metadata only Governments’ policy agendas: an analysis of laws enacted since 1983(Yasama Derneği, 2020) Esen, Berk; Bektaş, Eda; Department of International Relations; Ekinci, Esra İşsever; Other; Department of International Relations; College of Administrative Sciences and Economics; N/AThis article studies the policy priorities of Turkish governments through an analysis of government-sponsored laws that were enacted in the parliamentary period between 1983 and 2015. The entire list of government-sponsored laws enacted over 32 years was coded according to the coding system of the “Comparative Agendas Project” (CAP). In this way, governments’ policy priorities are determined by measuring the overall legislative performances of the governments based on different issue areas of laws. First, the article assesses the impact of various factors such as government type (single party-coalition governments) and government duration on the variation in the overall legislative performance of governments. Second, it engages in a comparative analysis of the issue areas of laws and highlights similarities and differences in the policy priorities and the political agendas of different governments. This analysis also discusses the impact of factors emphasized in the literature such as inter-party competition, international organizations, and crises independent of governments on the policy agenda of Turkish governments. As the study focuses on the post-1983 period, the article’s findings provide a detailed assessment of Turkish politics over the last three decades. The article’s findings suggest that legislative performance is positively correlated with government duration and that singleparty governments with longer mandate in office generally have higher legislative performances than coalition governments. Furthermore, the article demonstrates that Turkish governments primarily enacted laws in the areas of international relations, state administration, macroeconomics, justice crime and family issues, and defense policy and hence prioritized these areas more than the others. / Öz: Bu makale, 1983 ve 2015 arası parlamenter dönemde kurulan hükümetlerin Meclisten geçerek yasalaşan kanun tasarılarını analiz ederek, farklı hükümetlerin politika önceliklerini incelemektedir. Yaklaşık 32 sene gibi uzun bir zaman diliminde çıkmış olan tüm kanunlar, Karşılaştırmalı Gündemler Projesi’nin (KGP) kodlama sistemi kullanılarak konu kapsamlarına göre kodlanmıştır. Bu sayede, hükümetlerin yasama performansları ölçülerek politika öncelikleri belirlenmektedir. Çalışmada ilk olarak, hükümetlerin çıkardıkları kanunlar üzerinden genel yasama performansları ve buna etki eden etmenler analiz edilmektedir. Bu analizde hükümet türü (tek partikoalisyon hükümetleri) ve hükümet süresi gibi değişkenlerin üzerinde durulmaktadır. İkinci olarak ise hükümetlerin çeşitli politika alanlarındaki yasama performanslarına odaklanılmakta ve farklı siyasi dinamikler altında kurulmuş olan hükümetlerin çıkardıkları kanunların konuları karşılaştırılmaktadır. Böylece, farklı hükümetlerin politika öncelikleri ve gündemleri ortaya konmaktadır. Bu analiz ayrıca literatürde vurgulanan partiler arası rekabet, uluslararası kuruluşlar, hükümetlerden bağımsız gerçekleşen krizler gibi değişkenlerin Türkiye’de hükümetlerin politika gündemine etkisini tartışmaktadır. Çalışma, 1983 sonrası döneme odaklandığından, elde edilen bulgular ve bunların Türk siyaseti üzerine olası çıkarımları temel olarak son 30 yıllık dönemin ayrıntılı bir siyasi portresini vermektedir. Çalışmanın bulguları, ilgili dönemde hükümetlerin kanunlara dayalı yasama performanslarının görev süresinden etkilendiğini ve tek parti hükümetlerinin politika oluşturma ve yasamayı etkileme kapasitesinin koalisyon hükümetlerine göre genel olarak daha yüksek olduğunu göstermektedir. Ayrıca, hükümetlerin sırasıyla uluslararası ilişkiler, devlet idaresi, makroekonomi, adalet suç ve aile meseleleri ve savunma politika alanlarında diğer alanlara göre daha çok kanun çıkardıkları ve dolasıyla bu alanları diğer politika alanlarına göre önceledikleri görülmektedir.Publication Metadata only Maliye bürokrasisinde örgütsel değişim ve Vergi Denetim Kurulu Başkanlığı'nın kurulması(Türkiye ve Orta Doğu Amme İdaresi Enstitusu, 2012) Department of International Relations; Bakır, Caner; Faculty Member; Department of International Relations; College of Administrative Sciences and Economics; 108141The establishment of Tax Inspection Administration (TIB) on 10 July 2011 signifies a revolutionary organizational change in fiscal bureaucracy in Turkey. This paper argues that organizational stability at the Ministry of Finance (MoF) has been punctuated by the determined government’s powerful intervention in organizational change. This revolutionary organizational change came swiftly, and subsequently affected the MoF bureaucracy as a whole. The research is a qualitative analysis of the TAB’s establishment. A combination of interviews and written sources was the main approach to data collection. The paper found that under the title of ‘tax auditor’, a new sub-identity has been introduced that aims to eliminate various bureaucratic subidentities generating conflict among tax inspectors board, inspection board of finance, budget and fiscal controllers and tax auditors. This change is likely to enhance state’s infrastructural capacity to levy and collect taxes via a progress towards an efficient and effective tax-collection machinery. It would facilitate further organizational reforms that faced the strong resistance of tax inspectors board and inspection board members. This paper also points to several policy challenges ahead on this course. / 10 Temmuz 2011 tarihinde Vergi Denetim Kurulu Başkanlığı’nın (VDKB) kurulması ile maliye bürokrasisinin vergi incelemesi yapan dört farklı mesleki alt-kimliğe mensup kadroları ve bunların bağlı oldukları kurul ve başkanlıklar kaldırılmıştır. VDKB’nin kuruluşu, hem Maliye Bakanlığı’nın örgütsel yapısında, hem de Türk mali denetim sisteminde devrimsel örgütsel değişimi getirmektedir. .itel araştırma tekniği kullanılan bu çalışmada, mülakatlardan ve yazılı kaynaklardan yararlanılmıştır. Bu çalışmanın temel bulgusu, VDKB’nin kurulması ile maliye bürokrasisinde “kast sistemi” olarak tanımlanan dengenin “güçlü ve kararlı siyasi irade” tarafından kesintiye uğraması sonucu maliye bürokrasisinde devrimsel örgütsel değişim yönünde bir adımın atıldığıdır.Publication Metadata only Media effects in a polarized political system: the case of Turkey(Springer, 2024) Yıldırım, Kerem; Department of International Relations; Çarkoğlu, Ali; Department of International Relations; College of Social Sciences and HumanitiesCan the media influence vote choice when the media and the party system are highly polarized, and vote shifts are infrequent? We argue affirmatively that media significantly influences vote choice even in such systems. First, we show that information filtered through the media has an independent effect on vote choice. Second, we link respondents’ newspaper choices in the pre-election survey with the favorability of major political parties in their newspapers during the campaign period. Third, we provide rich empirical data from media content and voter surveys. Our analyses suggest that media content has a significant effect in influencing party support and vote switches during the campaign periods of four general elections between 2002 and 2015 in the increasingly polarized setting of Turkey. We further break down this effect to study how favorable coverage and visibility influence party support differently among partisan loyalists and switchers. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2023.