Nationalism and nation perception in Turkish political culture

The aim of this study is to test the perception differences among individuals for the concepts of nation and nationalism and to reach a conclusion by this way. The backbone of the study is to examine the inheritance of political culture inhereted by Otoman State to Turkish Republic and the dynamics caused this inheritance while the meaning attributed to the concepts of nation and nationalism by the society is explicated.Through this evalutaion, firstly, main lines of Turkish political culture is tried to be drawn by studying the concepts of culture and political culture. In order to determine the perception of nation and nationalism which has great importance at Turkish political culture, the concepts of nation, nationalism and Turkish nationalism has been detaily examined with their historical roots, in the paralel of different theoretical approaches and especially effective elements which constitute Turkish nationalism is explained.This study which is a descriptive research built on literature compilation also has empirical feature as it consists field survey. The last chapter of the study includes an inquiry to identify the present situation of the perception of Turkish society for their perception of nation and natinalism in this framework. The reason for this identify is; to define whether the arguments, expressions or approaches studied at the theorical part of the study is valid for Trukis society or not and its validity degree. This identification is aimed to be realised by the how the concepts of historical evaluation, state, religion, conservativity, army, opposition, democracy, secularism, language, etnic position constituted by independent variables like age, gender, education, income distribution, allocation unit and etnic origin.Mentioned field survey, has been realised by social inquiry. The uni-verse of the inquiry is described as households of men and women citizens, above 18 years old and living in Ankara. The reason to select Ankara as the universe; its being capital, getting migration from all over Turkey as a cos-mopolit city and its being have the most crowded population living in the city centre have been taken into consideration. Through this scope, general population of Ankara has been divided 3 distritcs for the criterias as demog-raphy and income distrubiton; and generalised by analysing 410 inquiries as the feedbacks of the general population of Ankara is thought to be the reflec-tion whole Turkey. As the result of analyzing the data, evaluations have been realised through 45 frequency and meaningful 15 crosstables that compare related questions of total 60 tables.