Türkiye'de seçmenlerin medya tüketimi ve ekonomik değerlendirmeleri

Economic voting theory claims that voters hold incumbents accountable such that they reward incumbents at the polls for economic prosperity and punish for economic decline. Though, how does the media influence voters' economic perceptions and contribute to actual vote choice? I argue that despite the newspaper content analysis has been applied as a method to study various issues, the query of economic news reporting and its impact on voters' economic evaluations has analogously received less recognition from Turkish scholars. This thesis explored whether media reporting of the economy influences voters' economic evaluations and systematically analyzed the extent news reporting tones of the newspapers influence voters' economic perceptions, and whether newspaper reading frequency alters them in Turkey. Subsequently, I generated an index called the pro-government news index and applied it as the main independent variable that combines actual economic news content and newspaper reading frequency concomitantly. I argue that this approach goes beyond dividing the newspapers as pro-government and pro-opposition but focus on actual news exposure. The data of this thesis involves a systematic content analysis of newspaper reporting of the economy and a nationally representative survey. During the newspaper content analysis, the first pages and pages under the economy sections of six national newspapers (Cumhuriyet, Hürriyet, Milliyet, Sabah, Sözcü, and Posta) within November 15, 2018, and February 16, 2019, were examined. I benefited the survey data to analyze economic evaluations of voters and their preferred source for receiving political information, and to link these data with the results from the newspaper content analysis. My results revealed that the pro-government news index has a statistically significant effect for all economic evaluations, but it does not show any substantial impact differentiation among economic evaluations as there is no systematically higher impact on sociotropic evaluations over pocketbook ones.