In our paper we focus on political sophistication and ideology to examine their impact on levels of political participation and civic engagement among young people in Turkey. Political sophistication has been conceptualised as the amount and nature of the structure of citizens’ political cognition on the process of political behaviour (Luskin, 1987). It has been found to have a profound effect on the mechanisms of information processing, storing and evaluation, decision-making and motivated reasoning but also emotional arousal. Ideological orientations as the system of beliefs one holds, affect directly public thinking and political responses (Lane, 1962). Therefore political sophistication and ideology are significant mediators of public behavior towards political affairs and as such they are expected to have a significant effect on the individual basis when looking at participation and civic engagement. Drawing upon the field of political psychology, we use survey data from the latest available wave in 2012 of the World Value Survey (N=1,605) to identify the differentiated effect of these components on levels of both conventional and unconventional political participation and civic engagement among young people and the remaining of the sample. In particular, we are interested in looking at whether the effect of sophistication and ideology varies for the young people and the remaining sample on levels of political participation and civic engagement.
