Politics Through Salience? Parliamentary Written Questions on Turkey in the European Parliament (2009-2022)

In recent years, seminal studies have discussed the potential emergence of a new form of transnational contestation in Europe, stemming from societal transformations during the era of globalization and European integration, compounded by financial and migration crises. From this perspective, a body of literature argues that the main axis of political contestation in Europe is shifting towards a GAL (green-alternative-libertarian) – TAN (tradition-authoritarian-national) dimension, highlighting the role of socio-cultural issues. However, despite the EU's increasing role in global politics and the EP’s (European Parliament's) unique structure with transnational political parties, there is a lack of research on how shifts in Europe are mirrored in the EP's external relations. This study addresses this gap by focusing on one of the key determinants of contestation and politicization: salience. Current literature often treats salience as a phenomenon that merely increases or decreases the emphasis on specific issues, institutions, or policies. However, this study integrates salience theory into the politicization literature and argues that parties’ choices to make an issue salient are influenced by their ideological stances. Political parties strategically increase the salience of certain issues (emphasizing) or aim to remove them from the political agenda (de-emphasizing), which creates contestation in line with the main ground of the contestation. In this sense, this research goes beyond the "is it salient?" perspective and hypothesizes that MEPs’ salience preferences -which align with their interests and political stances from the 'Who makes it salient?' perspective- are not exempt from political contestation, they can be an element of the emerging GAL-TAN dimension in Europe. Turkey is perceived as an ideal case to study because the EP’s external relations with Turkey align with the conflict zones of the new form of contestation. By using all parliamentary written questions (n = 1705) about Turkey from 2009 to 2022 in the EP as an empirical case, this study reveals which political dimension predominantly determines contestation over Turkey’s salience in the EP. The results indicate that the GAL-TAN dimension explains the contestation in the EP regarding Turkey's salience rather than the traditional left-right cleavage. In other words, the salience of Turkey within the European public sphere emerges not merely from daily political developments but contested in line with the new dimension in Europe. TAN-leaning parties attempt to increase Turkey's salience, and GAL parties, aware of TAN parties' efforts to shift the focus towards Turkey, strategically counter this by de-emphasizing the topics instead of directly competing with TAN parties on these grounds. This observation also challenges the predictions of the inverted-U model of European politics, which anticipates a closer alignment between far-left and far-left parties in the EP. This study is among the first to demonstrate the influence of the GAL-TAN dimension on the European Parliament's (EP) external relations. It shows that political parties, even at the transnational level within the EP, engage in contestation by either emphasizing or de-emphasizing issues, and this contestation aligns with the emergence of a new socio-cultural dimension in European politics.