Religiosity and political attitudes in Turkey: The case of Sakarya

This study aims to analyze the relationship between political behavior and religiosity in sample from Sakarya Province. To broaden this context, the study seeks to explore how political behavior, in conjunction with religiosity, is related to social distance, moral traditionalism, and socio-demographic variables (such as age, education, and income), as well as how identity orientations and expectations of management performance interact to influence an individual's political behavior. The study was conducted within the framework of the Relational Screening Model and, based on data obtained from 600 participants across Sakarya, the Religious Individual Life Scale (RILS), the Moral Traditionalism Scale (MTS), and the Social Distance Scale (SDS), as well as voting/vote-switching reasons in the context of political participation, candidate characteristics, and political information acquisition channels/levels. Within this framework, the influence of religiosity on shaping political behavior was tested through five main hypotheses and their corresponding sub-hypotheses. The results show that voter behavior cannot be reduced to a single theoretical axis and that a multi-layered decision logic, which varies according to context, shapes political behavior. On the one hand, individual religiosity functions as an "identity anchor" in the formation of political affiliation, while on the other hand, criteria for measuring management performance, such as justice, merit, corruption, and economic performance, function as practical "triggers" in changing or updating political behavior. Similarly, the perceived threat to rights associated with cultural trauma codes, such as the headscarf, produces a "cultural defense line" that largely transcends age and educational differences, creating a tension between individuals' rational performance expectations and their identity-based security sensitivities. Furthermore, the findings present a narrative of transformation in which individualized religiosity is reshaped in relation to institutional/communal forms of belonging, rather than a narrative of "religious loss" in which religion loses its importance. The new approach presented in this study proposes an integrated and multi-layered model that shows how center-periphery and cultural cleavage explanations better explain the individual's "belonging" dimension, while rational/economic assessments better define the "disengagement" dimension. It is assessed that establishing a political discourse that respects cultural freedom within the political sphere as a fundamental basis for determining political behavior, but that produces legitimacy primarily through justice, merit, and transparent management performance, will be more effective in understanding and predicting the dynamics of political behavior. The model's effectiveness is embodied in its ability to strengthen political rationality by combining the role of religiosity in establishing belonging with the determinacy of governance performance criteria in vote switching within the same analytical framework.