Browsing by Author "Arikan, Gizem"

Now showing 1 - 14 of 14

Attitudes towards the european union in Turkey: The role of perceived threats and benefits
(2012) Gizem Arikan; Arikan, Gizem
Public opinion towards the European Union in Turkey is a relatively understudied area. Although previous studies have identified some important factors that influence individual support for the European Union such as material expectations and democratic attitudes the role of other factors such as the perceived political benefits and threats have not been addressed. The purpose of this paper is to test group-centricism arguments which suggest that identity group-based interests and perceived threats are important determinants of attitudes. An analysis of data from the latest available Eurobarometer Survey shows that symbolic politics and perceived benefits play an important role in shaping individual attitudes towards the EU in Turkey. While subjective material and political expectations increase pro-EU attitudes the strength of national identity and perceived material and cultural threats to the nation are crucial in decreasing support for the EU.
Citation - WoS: 24
Citation - Scopus: 29
Does faith limit immorality? The politics of religion and corruption
(Routledge Journals, Taylor & Francis Ltd, 2013) Udi Sommer; Pazit Ben-Nun Bloom; Gizem Arikan; Bloom, Pazit Ben-Nun; Sommer, Udi; Bloompazit, Pazit Ben-Nun; Arikan, Gizem
Critically considering scholarship relating religiosity to ethical behaviour we contend that religion is systematically related to levels of corruption and that the nature of this relationship is contingent on the presence of democratic institutions. In democracies where political institutions are designed to inhibit corrupt conduct the morality provided by religion is related to attenuated corruption. Conversely in systems lacking democratic institutions moral behaviour is not tantamount to staying away from corrupt ways. Accordingly in non-democratic contexts religion would not be associated with decreased corruption. Time-series cross-sectional analyses of aggregate data for 129 countries for 12 years as well as individual level analyses of data from the World Values Surveys strongly corroborate the predictions of our theory. The correlation of religion with reduced corruption is conditional on the extent to which political institutions are democratic. © 2013 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group LLC. © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Citation - WoS: 8
Citation - Scopus: 9
Emotions in climate change communication: An experimental investigation
(DE GRUYTER MOUTON, 2022) Gizem Arikan; Gizem Melek; Defne Gunay; Arikan, Gizem; Melek, Gizem; Gunay, Defne
We conducted an experiment to test whether altering the saliency of information provided by experts in fictitious news stories on climate change triggered different emotions among readers. Based on appraisal theories of emotions in the psychology literature we hypothesized that 1) news stories that presented climate change related threats as diffuse and uncertain would elicit greater levels of anxiety while 2) stories that provided a specific target to blame would induce greater anger and 3) those that underlined the potential of technology and human efforts to solve climate change related issues would elicit greater levels of hope. We found that while all news stories concerning climate change elicited high levels of anxiety there were statistically significant differences between the emotions expressed by participations in the expected directions. We discuss the potential implications of these findings for climate change communication and for public opinion on climate change.
Citation - WoS: 25
Citation - Scopus: 31
Globalization Threat and Religious Freedom
(Blackwell Publishing Ltd customerservices@oxonblackwellpublishing.com, 2014) Pazit Ben-Nun Bloom; Gizem Arikan; Udi Sommer; Bloom, Pazit Ben-Nun; Sommer, Udi; Ben-Nun Bloom, Pazit; Arikan, Gizem
While arguably central to the human experience religion is a largely understudied component of social life and of politics. The comparative literature on religion and politics is limited in scope and offers mostly descriptions of trends. We know for example that restrictions on freedom of religion are on the rise worldwide. In our theoretical framework the recently higher universal levels of globalization combine with other sources of threat to account for the trend away from religious freedom. As threat to the majority religion increases due to globalization and an increasing number of minority religions freedom of religion is on the decline. Data for two decades from 147 nations are used to test hypotheses. Time-series cross-sectional and mediation models estimated at different levels of analysis with data from two independent sources confirm that threat systematically accounts for changes in religious freedom with globalization playing a key role. © 2013 The Authors. Political Studies. © 2013 Political Studies Association. © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Citation - WoS: 31
Citation - Scopus: 35
Priming Religious Belief and Religious Social Behavior Affects Support for Democracy
(OXFORD UNIV PRESS, 2013) Pazit Ben-Nun Bloom; Gizem Arikan; Bloom, Pazit Ben-Nun; Arikan, Gizem
The effects of religious belief and religious social behavior on support for democracy are investigated in a priming experiment conducted among Turkish Muslims and Israeli Jews. By varying the question order of World Values Survey (WVS) items which measure religious belief and religious social behavior it was demonstrated that priming religious social behavior facilitates while priming religious belief impedes support for democracy compared with a control group of no prime. These results were independent of participants' intensity of religious belief or the frequency of their religious social behavior and held for the most part across both religious affiliations and political contexts.
Citation - WoS: 62
Citation - Scopus: 75
Public attitudes towards climate change: A cross-country analysis
(SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC, 2021) Gizem Arikan; Defne Gunay; Arikan, Gizem; Gunay, Defne
Addressing climate change requires international effort from both governments and the public. Climate change concern is a crucial variable influencing public support for measures to address climate change. Combining country-level data with data from the Pew Research Center Spring 2015 Global Attitudes Survey we test whether perceived threats from climate change influence climate change concern. We distinguish between personal threat and planetary threat and we find that both threats have substantive effects on climate change concern with personal threat exerting a greater influence on climate change concern than planetary threat. The effects of both types of threats are also moderated by Gross Domestic Product per capita such that threats have stronger effects on climate change concern in high-income countries than in low-income countries. Our findings contribute to the existing literature and open up new debates concerning the role of threats in climate change concern and have implications for climate change communication.
Citation - WoS: 47
Citation - Scopus: 59
Religion and support for democracy: A cross-national test of the mediating mechanisms
(Cambridge University Press Journals_subscriptions@cup.cam.ac.uk, 2013) Pazit Ben-Nun Bloom; Gizem Arikan; Bloom, Pazit Ben-Nun; Arikan, Gizem
Religion can be a source of undemocratic attitudes but also a contributor to democratic norms. This article argues that different dimensions of religiosity generate contrasting effects on democratic attitudes through different mechanisms. The private aspect of religious belief is associated with traditional and survival values which in turn decrease both overt and intrinsic support for democracy. The communal aspect of religious social behaviour increases political interest and trust in institutions which in turn typically lead to more support for democracy. Results from multilevel path analyses using data from fifty-four countries from Waves 4 and 5 of the World Values Survey suggest there is some regularity in mechanisms responsible for the effect of religiosity on democratic support that extend beyond religious denomination. © 2012 Cambridge University Press. © 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Citation - WoS: 170
Citation - Scopus: 187
Religious social identity religious belief and anti-immigration sentiment
(Cambridge University Press, 2015) Pazit Ben-Nun Bloom; Gizem Arikan; Marie Courtemanche; Bloom, Pazit Ben-Nun; Ben-Nun Bloom, Pazit; Arikan, Gizem; Courtemanche, Marie
Somewhat paradoxically numerous scholars in various disciplines have found that religion induces negative attitudes towards immigrants while others find that it fuels feelings of compassion. We offer a framework that accounts for this discrepancy. Using two priming experiments conducted among American Catholics Turkish Muslims and Israeli Jews we disentangle the role of religious social identity and religious belief and differentiate among types of immigrants based on their ethnic and religious similarity to or difference from members of the host society. We find that religious social identity increases opposition to immigrants who are dissimilar to in-group members in religion or ethnicity while religious belief engenders welcoming attitudes toward immigrants of the same religion and ethnicity particularly among the less conservative devout. These results suggest that different elements of the religious experience exert distinct and even contrasting effects on immigration attitudes manifested in both the citizenry's considerations of beliefs and identity and its sensitivity to cues regarding the religion of the target group. © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Citation - WoS: 42
Citation - Scopus: 49
Social Values and Cross-National Differences in Attitudes towards Welfare
(SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD, 2015) Gizem Arikan; Pazit Ben-Nun Bloom; Bloom, Pazit Ben-Nun; Arikan, Gizem; Ben-Nun Bloom, Pazit
Studies on public opinion about welfare already acknowledge the role context plays in individual attitudes towards welfare. However the much-debated effect of socially held values and beliefs on attitudes towards social policy has not been empirically investigated. Drawing on studies in political and social psychology as well as Shalom Schwartz's work on universal human values this article argues that social values specifically egalitarianism and embeddedness affect individual support for social welfare policies. Moreover we posit that social values condition the effect that individual ideological orientations have on attitudes towards government responsibility such that the effect of embeddedness is much stronger for right-wing and moderate identifiers than those who lean towards the left. We test our hypotheses using data from the European Social Surveys (ESS) and International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) Role of Government module and employing multi-level modelling. Our results provide evidence of the importance of social context and shared values in influencing attitudes towards welfare.
Citation - WoS: 97
Citation - Scopus: 98
The effect of perceived cultural and material threats on ethnic preferences in immigration attitudes
(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2015) Pazit Ben-Nun Bloom; Gizem Arikan; Gallya Lahav; Bloom, Pazit Ben-Nun; Ben-Nun Bloom, Pazit; Arikan, Gizem; Lahav, Gallya
This paper shows that cultural and material threats exist side by side serving different psychological functions and that they manifest in differential attitudes towards immigrants from different ethnic or racial origins. While culturally threatened individuals prefer immigrants akin to themselves as opposed to those from different races and cultures the materially threatened prefer immigrants who are different from themselves who can be expected not to compete for the same resources. We test our hypotheses using multilevel structural equation modelling based on data from twenty countries in the 2002 wave of the European Social Survey. The disaggregation of these two types of perceived threat reveals responsiveness to the race of immigrants that is otherwise masked by pooling the two threat dimensions.
Citation - WoS: 16
Citation - Scopus: 18
The influence of societal values on attitudes towards immigration
(SAGE Publications Ltd, 2013) Gizem Arikan; Pazit Ben-Nun Bloom; Bloom, Pazit Ben-Nun; Arikan, Gizem; Ben-Nun Bloom, Pazit
This paper examines the influence of societal values on individual attitudes towards immigration and immigrants. We argue that conflict between individual and societal values leads individuals to be exposed to frames and opinions that are contrary to their values evokes competing considerations and creates attitudinal ambivalence and volatility. To evade ambivalence individuals whose values are in conflict with those of their society rely less on their core values to construct their attitudes. Using data from the first wave of European Social Surveys and relying on Heteroskedastic Maximum Likelihood Regression we test our argument simultaneously for 18 European countries and show that deviations from society's conservation and self-transcendence values lead to greater ambivalence in attitudes towards immigration and immigrants. Our results provide evidence of the importance of the social context and society's shared values in influencing personal political attitudes and judgments. © The Author(s) 2012. © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Citation - Scopus: 1
The public as an audience for the securitisation of climate change: facilitating conditions at the identification stage
(PALGRAVE MACMILLAN LTD, 2022) Defne Gunay; Gizem Arikan; Arikan, Gizem; Gunay, Defne
The literature on the emergence of climate change as a security problem notes the lack of studies of audiences that enable the successful construction of climate change as a security issue. While previous studies consider different types of audiences we focus on public opinion which provides moral support for securitising moves to investigate what individual and country level conditions facilitate individuals to identify climate change as a threat to humanity or a risk to themselves. We do so by analysing public attitudes towards climate security in 24 nations covered by the 2015 Pew Global Attitudes Survey. We differentiate between the logics of securitisation and riskification and different referent objects such as humanity and self. We then identify the patterns of threat and risk perception towards different referent objects in climate security. We find that individuals' personal insecurities translate into perceived personal risk from climate change while perceived threats to humanity from climate change are related to cognitive resources and sophistication.
Citation - Scopus: 1
Values religiosity and support for redistribution and social policy in Turkey
(Taylor and Francis Inc., 2016) Gizem Arikan; Arikan, Gizem
This paper investigates the individual level factors that influence support for social redistribution and social policy in Turkey by focusing on the role of core values and religiosity. The analysis of data from Round 4 of European Social Surveys shows that self-transcendence and conservation values enhance support for government provision of social safety nets. Different aspects of religiosity have different effects on attitudes toward redistribution and social policy with self-identified religiosity having a positive and social religious behavior having a negative effect on support for government responsibility in providing social insurance. © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Citation - WoS: 13
Citation - Scopus: 12
Values Religiosity and Support for Redistribution and Social Policy in Turkey
(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2013) Gizem Arikan; Arikan, Gizem
This paper investigates the individual level factors that influence support for social redistribution and social policy in Turkey by focusing on the role of core values and religiosity. The analysis of data from Round 4 of European Social Surveys shows that self-transcendence and conservation values enhance support for government provision of social safety nets. Different aspects of religiosity have different effects on attitudes toward redistribution and social policy with self-identified religiosity having a positive and social religious behavior having a negative effect on support for government responsibility in providing social insurance.