Studies on the political economy of social values

This study consists of three chapters, each addressing different dimensions of social values that appear to be independent of each other. The first chapter examines how social values and demographic characteristics influence attitudes toward migrants in Turkey. The results of the logit model analysis, based on 2018 World Values Survey (WVS) data, indicate a strong relationship between religion and nationalism and negative attitudes toward immigrants in Turkey. Improving one's social class has a positive effect on attitudes toward immigrants. However, perceiving immigrants as a competitive factor in the labor market is positively associated with negative attitudes towards them. Views toward immigrants are more influenced by values and socioeconomic position in society than by demographic characteristics. The second chapter of the study analyzes the impact of demographic characteristics on prioritizing environmental protection versus economic growth in Turkey and 63 other countries surveyed by the WVS between 2017 and 2022. A logit model is used to analyze the data, but no clear patterns are identified. However, in many of the surveyed countries, a positive correlation is found between education level and prioritizing pro-environmental policies. In Turkey, pro-environmental attitudes are negatively correlated with age in younger ages and positively correlated with income scale, postmaterialist values, town size, preference for statist rather than individualist preferences in business and industry, religion, nationalism, being on the right wing of the political spectrum, preference for democracy, and trust in civil society. The third chapter of the study analyzes the correlation between modernization and religiosity using the Seemingly Unrelated Regression (SUR) method on 108 countries included in the WVS study between 1989 and 2022. The empirical findings suggest the existence of a secularization process as there is a negative association between religiosity and various aspects of modernization. On the other hand, religiosity has a negative correlation with religious pluralism and the existence of a state religion. However, it has a positive correlation with state regulation of the religious market.