Social Pressures and Support for Democracy in Turkey

Abstract

Previous studies on religion and political attitudes often assumed that religion's impact on political attitudes must be observed among those who are believers or participate in religious services. Non-religious individuals, in these studies, were presumed to be the control group, the group for which religion should not generate any change in political attitudes. Literature on religion and support for democracy is no exception; studies tend to compare religious or practicing individuals to non-religious or non-practicing individuals (Ben-Nun Bloom & Arikan, 2012; Hoffman & Jamal, 2014). This study aims at discerning the impact of such non-religious social pressures on the support for democracy. Moreover, I aim to establish causal mediation analysis discerning to what extent the observed effect of non-religious social pressures on democratic attitudes is explained by secular social pressures mostly generated by nationalistic sentiments. My eventual aim is to argue that a considerable proportion of the impact of non-religious pressures generated by religion on democratic attitudes demonstrates similar characteristics as secular social pressures