What Can We Learn From Political Psychology about Political Participation: A Qualitative Fieldwork with “Gezi” Protestors

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The Gezi Protests of June 2013 is one of important milestones in Turkish political history. Turkish society is well-known with high level of inertia in terms of political participation and percentage of those had that kind of political experience is lower than 10 percent. In such a discouraging political environment, the Gezi Protests need special attention as a political movement. This article aims to present a political psychological point of view to understand this unique phenomenon, by using the Grounded Theory methodology to analyze in depth interviews conducted with participants in Autumn 2013. This analysis of personal narratives discovered presence of “grievances”, “feeling of being excluded”, “political cynicism” and “anger”, concepts revealed by political protests literature of political psychology discipline. It also presented some early clues of “politicized collective identities” in personal narratives. To conclude, this article shows that newly emerging political psychology discipline provides a large toolbox of concepts to understand the Gezi Protests.

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Political Participation , Protest , Youth Participation in Politics , Political Psychology

Journal Of Political Science

58

Journal Of Political Science