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UNPACKING THE RELATIONSHIP AMONG DOGMATISM, ENVIRONMENTAL ATTITUDES AND POLITICAL IDEOLOGY IN TURKEY
Abstract by Dr. Cagdas Dedeoglu On Session 282  (Eco-Criticism I)

On Sunday, November 17 at 11:00 am

2019 Annual Meeting

Abstract
Recently, Turkey has started to attract scholars working in the broader environmental humanities field, particularly in the field of environmental history. However, the studies related to the environments in Turkey are still limited; the attempts of linking environment, religion, and politics are rare. The latter mostly focuses on the relationship between religious identity and environmental attitude. This study, instead, seeks to contribute to the debate by investigating whether dogmatism at individual level causes a lack of environmental attitude in Turkey. It also seeks to understand whether this relationship is affected by the political ideology of individuals. In this respect, the current work surveys three bodies of literature. Firstly, it draws on the study of religion and nature, which emerged after Lynn White Jr.’s critique of Christianity’s anti-ecological essence. Benefitting from religion and nature thinking, this study approaches the human-nature interaction from a constructionist perspective enabling an ecocentric comprehension of the environments. Secondly, it pays attention to the analytical works assessing environmental behavior and attitudes to find common routes of examination. Lastly, it benefits from the literature on political behavior to explore religious and environmental identities concerning political ideology in Turkey. Within this conceptual framework, it presents two hypotheses: (1) In Turkey, dogmatism correlates with anti-environmental attitude. (2) There are no significant differences among the voters of AKP and CHP in the environmental aspect. In order to test these hypotheses, this study will employ the Wave 6 World Value Survey data on Turkey. Some parametric tests will implicate on data such as t-test, ANOVA and stepwise regression models. The study utilizes the data to obtain the distributions of citizens regarding dogmatism and environment as well as their voting tendencies. It does not treat the problem a religious one as Lynn White Jr. did, but a problem of dogmatism. So, it mainly applies two questions to be related to dogmatism: "Whenever science and religion conflict, religion is always right" (Q153) and "The only acceptable religion is my religion" (Q154). For evaluating environmental attitude, it uses the data obtained from the question about "protecting the environment vs. economic growth" (Q81). The data about political party preference (V228) will also be assessed in its relationship to religion and environment dimensions. Keywords: Dogmatism, Environmental attitude, Political ideology, Turkey, World Values Survey
Discipline
Political Science
Geographic Area
Turkey
Sub Area
None