The impact of the prolonged candidacy process on Euroscepticism in Turkey: Externality, uncertainty and belatedness

In this study, the impact of externality, uncertainty and belatedness brought about by Turkey's candidate status on university youth's Euroscepticism was studied. The reason why this study focused specifically on highly cognitive mobilized university students is that understanding the attitudes of university students, who can be described as the winning groups of globalization, towards the European Union in highly young populated Turkey is of significance. Therefore, a wide literature review on different approaches explaining public attitudes in member and candidate countries was carried out. Then, the theoretical framework and hypotheses of the thesis were presented in detail by addressing the situational factors that are stated to cause Euroscepticism in the candidate countries. In order to test the hypotheses, a survey method, one of the quantitative research methods, was used. In this context, an online survey was conducted on university students across Turkey through Survey Monkey. In this survey, in which the sample consists of 1027 students, externality, uncertainty and belatedness were considered as independent variables while variables related to alternative approaches in the literature were considered as control variables. The results of the multiple linear regression analysis revealed that externality, uncertainty and belatedness have varying levels of effects on university students' Euroscepticism.