ERF 26th Annual Conference
Syrian Migrants, Domestic and International Politics: Parsing out Sentiments on Turkish Twitter
No.
ERF26_287
Publisher
ERF
Date
July, 2020
Topic
F2. International Factor Movements and International Business
Migration, in general, and, refugee flows in particular has constituted a central topic of scholarly inquiry over the last decade. Turkey has been one of the countries that received high number of refugees, both per capita and in absolute figures, during this time period. Inevitably, the issue has become an important topic both in Turkish domestic politics and foreign policy. Although public opinion has played an important role in shaping Turkey’s policies towards Syrian refugees, our knowledge on how these attitudes form is scant. This study aims to address this gap. To do so, we have taken a four-month snapshot of Turkish tweets on Syrian refugees and assessed the picture they depict regarding the refugees in online social media. Such clustering made the hand-coding of the content of these tweets feasible. Our findings suggest that security concerns trump over all others. They also indicate that the issue of Syrian refugees is a highly politicized issue as attitudes in almost half of the tweets are associated with a Turkish political party. We also find that being pro-Syrian refugee does not necessarily associate with humanitarian concerns. Such tweets display various undertones; a large number of pro-Syrian refugee tweets also carry a Sunni-racist tone. This study carries two main theoretical contributions: the study (i) extends the emerging literature on the link between domestic politics and foreign policy in Turkey; and, (ii) offers one of the first systematic descriptions of a host population’s online attitudes and perceptions towards refugees. The study’s methodological contribution relates to a novel clustering technique, developed by the authors, which allows tweets with similar contents to be clustered under distinct groups, hence making hand-coding of their content a feasible endeavor.
Authors
Emre Hatipoglu
Sabanci University
Authors
Osman Zeki Gokce
Assistant Professor of Political Science and International...
Authors
Inanç Arin
Sabanci University
Authors
Yücel Saygin
Sabanci University