Ali Çarkoğlu

I am a political scientist specializing in elections, voting behavior, public opinion, and Turkish politics. I have led and participated in major cross-national and national projects such as the Turkish Election Study (TES), Turkish Giving Behaviour Study, International Social Survey Program (ISSP), and Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES). I took part in the planning committees for Modules 5 and 6 in CSES and ISSP modules on family and changing gender roles (2012, 2022), religion (2018), and social networks (2017). I am the founding PI in TES and developed the campaign media content data program, which documents daily campaign content for over ten national newspapers since 2002. My work can be accessed here.

My current research is an exploration of the secularization process in Turkey, a topic where the evidence has so far been mixed. Some scholars find the Turkish experience to possess reflections of secularization, as expected following classical modernization theory, while others present evidence that contradicts these expectations. The most recent contributions to this literature now focus on outliers where resistance to secularization exists, and one even finds a resurgence of religiosity in various dimensions of social life. I focus on Turkey, which can be considered an outlier. In the past, I have contributed to this literature through several projects and articles and touched upon the enduring influence of religion in political life.

My main argument in this project is that Turkish society's dual character, where a potentially secularizing group faces an increasingly resacralizing group, is responsible for the contrasting findings about secularization and creating the Turkish outlier. I follow historical and quantitative research, bringing together comprehensive data that focus on the country's critical areas of social development. I argue that underlying Turkish ideological and affective polarization is the dual character of Turkish society with opposing secularization trends.