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Attitudinal Ambivalence towards T urkey's EU Membership
Author(s) -
Erisen Cengiz,
Erisen Elif
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
jcms: journal of common market studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.54
H-Index - 90
eISSN - 1468-5965
pISSN - 0021-9886
DOI - 10.1111/jcms.12091
Subject(s) - eurobarometer , ambivalence , turkish , accession , politics , european union , political science , social psychology , population , immigration , sociology , economics , psychology , law , international trade , linguistics , philosophy , demography
Abstract This article takes a comparative political behaviour approach to examine the multifaceted nature of T urkey's E uropean U nion ( EU ) membership bid from the perspective of the EU citizens. We propose a multidimensional explanation for EU citizens' attitude towards T urkey's membership by referring to the political psychology literature on attitudinal ambivalence. We examine whether EU citizens simultaneously hold multiple and conflicting considerations on T urkey's EU accession bid, and whether this ambivalence has attitudinal consequences. To that end, we use the Eurobarometer 66.1 data set to analyze the EU public attitudes on various aspects of possible Turkish EU membership. The findings show that the EU citizens maintain ambivalent views about Turkish membership across three domain pairs: economy–security, immigration–security and population–culture. The significant impact of these ambivalence domains on increasing support for T urkey's membership to the EU is further discussed in the article.