Press-party parallelism in Turkey: an individual level interpretation

Abstract

This article aims to measure the level of partisanship for readers of major newspapers in Turkey. In so doing partisan alignments of those newspapers as reflected in the party preferences of their readers are diagnosed. Alternatively, different levels of pluralism as reflective of newspaper outlets within different party supporters are also depicted. Using micro-individual level survey data it is shown that while internal pluralism within newspaper readership communities is declining, the external pluralism is on the rise. Decreasing internal pluralism indicates increasing bias in individual media outlets towards particular political parties.