Understanding the dynamics of support for the European Union among Turkish youth: An examination of the importance of implicit attitudes

Turkish public opinion on EU is a relatively under-studied area in political science literature. To understand the dynamics behind the attitudes towards the EU, this study applies to implicit association test (IAT) and explicit survey measures, andtwo social psychological theories of inter-group relations, namely social identity, and system justification theories. The recent literature has shown that implicit attitudes can contribute to our understanding of vote choice (see Iyengar and Westwood 2015;Raccuia 2016; Ryan 2017). Employing data from a sample of 247 participants from three universities and the youth branches of the four major Turkish political parties,the study compares the strengths of explicit and implicit attitudes on a hypothetical membership referendum to the EU. The findings suggest that the Turkish national identity occupies a pivotal place in shaping the perceptions and preferences of the Turkish youth toward the EU. In the logistic regression analysis, the explicit EU attitudes predict vote choices on the hypothetical referendum better than any other variable. Even though it shows significant correlations with self-report EU measures,the predictive value of the implicit EU attitudes on voting behavior is not as strong as hypothesized. Nonetheless, in the OLS regression analysis, implicit measures are statistically significant in explaining the legitimacy of the system boundaries between the EU and Turkey. These findings are discussed in relation to their importance in understanding the complex nature of Turkish public opinion on the issue of theEU-Turkey relations and other political preferences.