Can political parties lead opinions in religious matters?: experimental results on partisan cue taking in Turkey

Official URL: http://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b1648988 (Table of Contents)

Can political parties shape opinions regarding religious matters? Over the recent years, Islamist parties across the world have de-emphasized Islamist themes in their electoral platforms (Kurzman and Turkoglu, 2015). This change is also evident in Turkey, where the political parties of the main Islamist movement have gradually dropped the platforms of Islamic economics from their party programs. Such changes within the Islamist parties could lead their followers to shift their focus away from the legal interpretation of religious corpora and move towards a more secularized vision of social order through the framing of their opinions by the political parties. Moreover, the changing rhetoric within the Islamist parties might also influence the opinions of the supporters of parties other than the Islamist parties. Yet the literature on voting behavior has found that political parties are the least successful in leading the opinions of voters regarding moral matters compared to other social or economic matters and religious claims are often unable to lead opinions in societal and political matters. In this study I utilize a convenience sample recruited via Facebook to investigate both in-group and out-group party-leading effects on the people’s perceptions of religious doctrines of Islamic economics, particularly the issues of inheritance distribution and interest-based banking, in Turkey. The evidence indicates that in-group party cuing does not exist, but out-group party cuing exists within the sample of the study.