Political motivation and persuasion

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the effect of the political actor (leaders, candidates, staff) and institutional ( programs, ideologies, functions and missions) factors on political choice the voting behavior of Turkish voters. In the first part of the thesis, motivation theories are summarized. They are classified into 3 main groups. They are; a) fundamental theories, b) need theories and c) cognitive theories. In the second part, conceptual framework of the subject is spelt out; indicators of the concepts are identified; and conceptual frame is formulated to form a model and the relations among the variables are specified In the third part, the findings of the field research which had been done on the voters who reside in Keçiören district of Ankara are presented in tabular form. In order to verify the hypotheses given in the first two parts are tested against the data. According to the results reached in the thesis, motivation theories are put forward to explain the human behavior in general are also helpful to a significant extent to explain political behavior, especially voting behavior. These theories should, be subjected to some modifications because of the extensive characteristics of the subject. According to one other result obtained, voter is activated by the dynamics of the political behavior. The direction, strength and insistence of this activation is being determined by the valances of and expectations from political actors and institutions. Persuader can succeed as far as he/se creates a motivational power on the target mass. For this reason, motivation has a central place in persuasion works. Accordingly, knowing how the voter to be motivated makes it easy to create political behavior wanted from bini.