Syrians in Turkey and their naturalization as Turkish citizens: A computational text analysis of newspaper data

Abstract

Following the civil war in Syria in 2011, migration from Syria in massive numbers has caused various political, demographic, societal, and cultural challenges in Turkey. The focus of this research is on how the issue of naturalization of Syrians as Turkish citizens has been presented in Turkish newspapers and to what extent the dominant perspective on the issue has shifted over time. For our computational textual analysis of Turkish newspaper materials published between 2012 and 2019, we compiled a corpus consisting of 15,276 news items from four newspapers featuring the co-occurrence of the words “Syria*” (Suriye*) and “citizen*” (vatandaş*) in the main body of their text. The newspapers include mainstream and pro-government (Milliyet with liberal tendencies, Sabah with center-right tendencies), and left-wing (Sol, Evrensel) perspectives. A two-step textual analysis was conducted on the corpus. First, dictionary-based topic modeling was used to chart which broader topics Turkish citizenship of Syrians is predominantly linked to the data, and how the predominance of topics shifted over time. Second, a collocation analysis of the word “refugee” (mülteci) yields a more fine-grained picture of the specific words and expressions that tend to appear often when Syrian refugees are discussed. In both steps, an aggregated general analysis was complemented with separate newspaper-specific analyses, thus allowing for the comparison of different newspapers. Findings show that Syrians in Turkey predominantly feature in the context of diplomatic and societal topics. While mainstream news sources approach the issue less critically, left-wing newspapers show more sensitivity to migrant rights in Turkey.