Diagnosing Trends and Determinants in Public Support for Turkey's EU Membership

Abstract

Abstract Despite scholarly interest in the process of Turkey's candidacy for European Union (EU) membership, what is missing in the literature is a detailed examination of Turkish public opinion on the issue. Using Turkish Election Surveys, Eurobarometer surveys and International Social Survey Programme data, we test whether economic considerations, support for democracy, attachment to national identity and religiosity affect Turkish individuals' attitudes towards Turkey's EU membership. Perceived national economic conditions and national identity have a negative impact while satisfaction with democracy is positively linked to support for EU membership. Contrary to expectations, religion exerts no significant influence over membership preferences. Keywords: TurkeyEU MembershipPublic OpinionPublic Support for EUMass Attitudes Notes [1] See Müftüler-Baç (2008a Müftüler-Baç, M. 2008a. The European Union's accession negotiations with Turkey from a foreign policy perspective. 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The last two observations for December 2008 to February 2009 and October–December 2009 were obtained from ISSP's Religion III and Social Inequality surveys carried out by Ali Çarkoğlu and Ersin Kalaycıoğlu with the financial support of the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBÏTAK). [3] Considering the drop in public support for EU membership, one has to take into account the negative developments on the European side of the relationship. One major issue in these developments was the bottlenecks the Turkish side encountered on the Cyprus issue, especially in the aftermath of the Annan Plan referendum in April 2004. Despite expectations and promises of normalisation if not a complete resolution of the long-standing conflict, the Turkish side was not able to achieve any significant progress that could benefit the lives of the Turkish Cypriots on the island. To what extent such a development is linked to public opinion's negative image of the EU and the membership project is not clear from empirical data. However, taking this together with the lukewarm, if not completely negative stances of the German and French authorities towards Turkey's membership, it appears that the Turkish public at large has persistently received an unwelcoming signal from the European side. Such a signal is thus typically linked in daily political conversations to declining public support for membership. However, there is yet no empirical evidence as to whether the public is attentive to the mutual policies of Turkey and European States, nor do we know whether such developments in international politics have an influence on evaluations of EU membership at comparable magnitudes to other factors to be underlined below. [4] See Çarkoğlu (2004 Çarkoğlu, A. 2004. “Societal perceptions of Turkey's EU membership: causes and consequences of support for EU membership?”. 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