| Description |
This dissertation analyzes popular participation in contentious politics such as protests, demonstrations, and other forms of disruptive actions in Turkey. It seeks to explain how and when the patterns of popular engagement in protest have changed during the last six decades by quantitatively and systematically examining various data on protest events in the public space. This dissertation seeks to answer the following three central questions. First, how have the patterns of protest participation evolved over time in Turkey? Second, is Turkey moving toward a “social movement society†in which protest becomes a conventional mode of politics? Third, how do age-related variables including life cycle, political generation, and period affect individuals’ propensity to join protest? To answer these questions, I used a variety of data. The first source is the information compiled in the World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators that presents a set of cross-national aggregate data of protest events and state control in the world. The second source is my original data set that covers more than 1,000 protest events through the coding of a Turkish national newspaper, Cumhuriyet. Third, I used the Turkish components of the World Values Survey that were carried out in 1990, 1998, 2001, and 2007. Analyzing the interactions between protest participation and political and socio-economic factors in Turkey, this dissertation argues that we should integrate protest behavior and state control into an interactional framework. I demonstrate that the rise and fall of protest politics between the late 1940s and the late 1970s was significantly affected by the state’s ability to sanction political dissidents. It also quantitatively presents the change and continuity of protest participation in the post-1980 military coup period. At the individual level, this dissertation finds that protest is not diffusing to various sectors of the population. Furthermore, it shows that protest potential among Turkish citizens is influenced by lifecycle and period effects rather than a generational effect. |
