Effects of voting approaches on reputation value of political leader: A study on university students

In today's political communication activities that are aimed towards the acquisition of political power, the political leadership factor has been of considerable importance. During this process, the content of political campaigns are formed around the leaders. The most important reason for this is, the effect that leaders have on the voting behavior of most voters. Because voter preferences are formed in respect to leaders, the reputation values of political leaders gain on importance. The thesis is constructed on this conceptual framework with the first chapter dealing with voting approaches as voter behaviors, the second chapter reviews the literature on political leadership and leader reputation studies. The third chapter is evaluating the reputation values of political leaders from a voting approach through a survey assessing the voter perceptions of AK Party leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, CHP leader Kemal Kılıcdaroğlu and MHP leader Devlet Bahçeli. The study has been conducted on 900 students obtained by convenience sampling from 4 Turkish universities (Uludağ, Erciyes, Adıyaman and Gümüşhane Universities). The analysis revealed that voting approaches could be divided into five fundamental factors, as "issue oriented voting", "sociological voting-1" –voter and society relationship-, "ideological voting", "rational voting", "sociological voting-2" –leader and society relationship. A regression analysis showed that so defined voting approaches influenced leader reputation.