The motives of young people in Turkey in venue selection for political participation

Official URL: http://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b1558763 (Table of Contents)

This study aims to explore the determinants of the venue selection for youth political participation. The research question of the study is “What are the motives of young people in Turkey in deciding their venue for political participation?” In addition, the sub questions aim to discover the young people’s stories of political involvement, their opinions about the institution they are involved in, their political activities in their organizations and through those institutions, their involvement in ongoing constitutionmaking process in Turkey. The findings reveal that the determinants of young people’s venue selection include their families or the social group they belong to, and their definition and expectations from politics. They also reflect the similarities and differences between different organizations. Lastly, the study concludes with suggestions for further research. The first part explains the aims of this study and its contributions to the literature. In the second part, the comprehensive literature review consists of the different definitions of the concept of youth, and continues with youth political participation both in general and in Turkey and the literature on constitution-making and political participation. In the third part, the focus group research design, case selection and data analysis used in this study is explained. The fourth part consists of the in-depth analysis of focus group data both summarizing the focus group interviews and presenting highlighting themes arising from discussions. In the last part, the highlighting themes of focus groups are compared and contrasted, and the discussion on the current study is presented.