Politik oryantasyon ve vatandaşlık: Türk gençliğinin algılamaları ve deneyimleri

Citizenship is generally perceived as an issue that falls in the domain of nation-states.This study, instead, attempted to give a central focus to the pivotal position of individualcitizens in the whole citizenship concept. This thesis, drawing upon an empirical study,explored the perceptions and experiences of Turkish youth with different politicalorientations over citizenship and its three dimensions: legal status, identity, and civicvirtue. Two questions were central to the main purposes of the study; first, therelationship between political orientation and perceptions of citizenship; second, theinterplay among the legal status, identity, and civic virtue aspects of citizenship. In-depth interviews were conducted in the city of İstanbul with seventy university studentswith different political orientations, namely: republicans, nationalists, leftists, Islamists,liberals, Kurdish and apolitical groups.Overall, the results of this study revealed that the meaning of `being citizen?showed diversity in the mindsets of young people with different political orientations. Itwas found out that legal status was mostly subscribed by the liberal group, whereas thenationalist, Islamist, Kurdish, and apolitical groups tended to identify themselves withthe identity aspect, and the republican group with the civic virtue aspect. The leftistinterviewees, among the other study groups, did not draw a homogenous conception ofcitizenship. A secondary conclusion that emanated from the findings of this study wasthat the prevailing tendency to lay citizenship merely as a substance of rights and dutiesand formal membership in a particular community would fall short to cope with thecrises of the modern democratic states. There is a need to give a central attention to theidentity and civic virtue aspects of citizenship, which are inseparable constituents of thewhole citizenship concept.Keywords:Citizenship, political orientation, youth, legal status, identity, civic virtue.