Affective Polarization

Affective Polarization among Turkish Migrants in Germany Turkish migrant’s socio-political integration into Germany and their relatively poor performance despite their long time of residence in Germany have gathered a significant scholarly attention. Particularly, their political integration is expected to correlate with generations. This paper aims to investigate affective polarization among Turkish migrants in Germany based on socio-political divides in Turkey. Considering their integration and political resocialization performance, I argue that Turkish migrants in Germany can constitute a typical case of affective polarization. Affective polarization literature considers partisanship as a social identity, (elite) ideological extremity, partisan sorting, and information environment among causes of partisan animus. I expect to find evidence that participants are affectively polarized based on socio-political divides in Turkish society; and partisanship as a social identity, partisan sorting, and the information environment have an impact on this outcome. Considering the positive effect of naturalization (e.g., Hainmueller et al., 2015) and generation (Goerres et. al, 2021) on political integration into the host country’s political system, I believe that citizenship can interact with the political behavior of migrants; therefore, I also analyze the impact of citizenship on migrants’ affective polarization. I test the hypotheses on two groups of young, educated, naturalized, and unnaturalized migrants as the least and the less likely groups to be affectively polarized based on socio-political divides in the country of origin. I expect to find that partisan animus is observable among migrants regardless of their citizenship and the findings may mirror the data on the affective polarization of the Turkish domestic electorate. Remarkably, my observations might be more significant for conservative migrants. The data will be collected through face-to-face interviews with participants from North Rhine Westphalia, the most populated state of Germany by Turkish migrants.