Class mobility, ethnicity and migration: Explaining protest participation in Turkey

The thesis investigates the protest participation behaviors in response to changes in class and class mobility, ethnicity, and migration in Turkey. Using the household-level data collected by the collaboration of the KONDA Research and Consultancy Firm and the Emerging Markets Welfare Project, the thesis examines how class systems interact with migration and ethnicity in shaping individuals' protest participation attitudes. The thesis aims to portray protest participation choices by examining three interrelated layers: first, it provides the most updated class profiling for the Turkish population as of 2019. Second, it provides diagonal reference modeling results on the divergent pathways of the Kurdish population. Third, it scrutinizes the effect of migration on Kurdish mobilization after the 1980s. By employing quantitative methods of mobility research, the thesis aims to achieve a synthesized theoretical framework on how class mobility interact and effect protest participation behaviors. The thesis further discusses the local and global political-economic context that would result in divergent protest participation behaviors of migrant Kurds. It aims to achieve a synthesized theoretical framework that would position at the intersection between social movement studies and mobility research, where we observe that class cleavage still matters in shaping individuals' protest participation preferences.