Political participation of university youth in Turkey: An application on the students of Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences of Dumlupınar University

Political knowledge and values or political behaviors of individuals in a society can be defined as political socialization or in short, the process of learning politics. Individuals begin to acquire knowledge and attitudes about the political system in the process of political socialization. This attitude that people take can sometimes be positive and sometimes negative. This attitude shows itself as political participation. Individuals demonstrate political involvement in order to show the disturbance they have from the political system or to maintain the continuity of the political system with the sympathy they have created for the political system. This study, "Political Participation of University Youth in Turkey: An Application on the Students of Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences of Dumlupınar University", carried out to designate if there are political tendencies, level of the political participation, form of the political participation, political interests and effective factors of the political behaviors. The data which is displayed in this study was obtained by using two ways: literature research and survey which was applied to 500 people. The survey focused on the impact of the independent variables defined as; "level of family income", "father's occupation", "size of settlement" and "mass media communication" to the dependent variable that is defined as "political participation". The study was constructed as three chapters. In the first chapter; the theoretic aspects of political culture and political socialization was investigated. The second chapter inquired into "political participation" and its factors. Besides, the chapter covers relation between youth and politics by mentioning the youth movement briefly. The contention of final chapter consists of the survey's outcomes, tables of the data and conclusion. Keywords: Political Culture, Political Socialization, Youth, Political Participation, Voting.