In this paper we are exploring the affective, cognitive and motivational elements of political behavior of the citizens in Turkey. Although there have been numerous studies looking at the factors that explain voting behavior, they fail to address the origins and mechanism of political behavior in Turkey. Focusing on the ongoing conflict between political Islam and Kemalist secular nationalism and their corresponding political agents, this study explores the role of political ideology, the underlying forces of motivated political reasoning and political sophistication as well as the significance of emotional responses to particular political stimuli. Our main aim is to bring on the surface those affective, cognitive and motivational elements that lie behind citizens’ political attitudes in Turkey. Following the work of Robert Lane and Jennifer Hochschild our study draws on the findings from 17 in- depth interviews conducted in Istanbul in 2012. The analysis shows that the ideological orientations of political Islamism and Kemalism in some instances share a common understanding of the political conditions of the country. However, they often appear to shape conflictual attitudes based on the affective and motivational elements that lie behind citizens’ political considerations. We find that different ideological orientations and levels of political sophistication direct to specific attitudes towards various socio- political issues. In addition, we offer a first account of the role of emotions in Turkish politics. We find that emotional responses are dependent on the ideological dispositions and in many cases on the levels of political sophistication that each participant holds. These results show that the Turkish public has to be further studied under the lens of political psychology aiming to a systematic account of the political evolution that takes place in the country.
