Türkiye'de Gençlerin Siyasal Katılımı: Motivasyon Olarak Sosyal Medya

Abstract

The literature mainly underlines that young people are apathetic; they are not interested in politics, and they only give attention to the matters that directly affect their lifestyles. However, these assumptions miscalculate the changing patterns of political participation and the complexity of the channels that young people can reach in this time. The Internet has opened new ways of political participation by lowering the cost and providing the opportunity to access information from all over the world, enhancing the spectrum of political participation. Young people may not be members of political parties, but they are active in civil society groups; they may not hold general elections, but they do comment on certain issues. This situation provides new opportunities for young people to become politically active and mobilized. The main aim of this study is to see the impact of internet/ social media on the political participation of youth in Turkey, and to analyze the social media as a motivation of political participation among the young members of political parties and civil society. The main argument is that social media motivates young people to participate in political parties by seeing and reading about their activities while motivating young people to participate in civil society by encouraging civic duties. To investigate this, we made an interview with 30 executive members (10 from each organization), from AK Party, CHP, and GoFor (Gençlik Örgütleri Forumu) and analyze the content via MaxQda software. The finding of the study is that young people who tend to care about political issues and the ones who read, research, and become engaged in politics are also the ones reading, researching, and engaging in political issues in the online arena in Turkey.