turkey Archives - kai arzheimer

Every now and then, I spend a merry evening pulling half-forgotten manuscripts/preprints into this not-so-new website. So here is tonight’s potpourri:

Our 2007 German Politics paper on the then recent absolute majority for the SPD in Rhineland-Palatinate. Glory days! Here is my update on the SPD’s not-so-brilliant performance in the 2011 election.
My BJPIR reply to Michael Lister’s rejoinder to my comment on his paper (you’re still with me) on turnout and inequality. Easily my best paper title ever, as it crams together one of philosophy’s greats and a phony reference to popular culture in just two words.
My 2009 attack against a paper in Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie and Sozialpsychologie that claimed that Turkey cannot join the EU because they are, you know, Muslims [in German].
Our 2006 EJPR paper on Political Opportunity Structures and the Extreme Right in Western Europe (still widely cited)

Last year, the “Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie and Sozialpsychologie” published an article on the level of support for the European Union’s core principles (democracy, gender equality, religious freedom, rule of law) in Turkey. In essence, the author claimed that the level of support for these principles in Turkey is low because a) the level of economic development is low while b) the number of Muslims is very high. Thanks to the very efficient PR office at the university of Cologne, these findings made their way into the mainstream media in Germany (including the English service of the Deutsche Welle) and Turkey and eventually even into the more shady parts of the blogosphere (that are normally the object rather than the consumer of sociological studies).

I felt, however, that the analysis suffered from a whole host of serious methodological and theoretical shortcomings, and that the claims of the original paper are untenable. Therefore, I wrote a comment on “Paßt die Türkei zur EU und die EU zu Europa” (in German, also as PDF). The Kölner Zeitschrift has recently accepted my article, and it will appear in the next issue. Replication data and stata scripts for my paper are available, too.

Technorati Tags: turkey, democracy, Islam, Muslims, multi-level analysis, european, union, values, survey, sociology, stata