Politics of Nostalgia and Populism: Evidence from Turkey

The Department of International Relations will host Dr. Ezgi Elçi on 12 February 2021 with his study titled "Politics of Nostalgia and Populism: Evidence from Turkey." The event will take place online via Zoom on the 12th of February between 17.00-19.00pm.

The abstract of the study and a short biography of Ezgi Elçi can be found below.

Abstract
This article scrutinizes the relationship between collective nostalgia and populism. Different populist figures utilize nostalgia by referring to their country’s ‘good old’ glorious days and exploiting resentment of the elites and establishment. Populists instrumentalize nostalgia in order to create their populist heartland, which is a retrospectively constructed utopia based on an abandoned but undead past. Using two original datasets from Turkey, this study first analyzes whether collective nostalgia characterizes populist attitudes of the electorate. The results illustrate that collective nostalgia has a significantly positive relationship with populist attitudes even after controlling for various independent variables, including religiosity, partisanship, satisfaction with life, and Euroscepticism. Secondly, the study tests whether nostalgic messages affect populist attitudes using an online survey experiment. The results indicate that Ottoman nostalgia helps increase populist attitudes. Kemalist nostalgia, however, has a weak direct effect on populist attitudes that disappears after controlling for party preference.
Short Biography
Ezgi Elçi is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Migration Research Center at Koç University (MiReKoç). He is also an instructor in the Department of International Relations at Istanbul Bilgi University and a research affiliate in an ERC project entitled “Democracy Under Threat: How Education Can Save It” (DEMED). He obtained his Ph.D. in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Koç University in November 2019. Previously, he was a visiting student researcher in the Center for the Study of Global Issues (GLOBIS) at the University of Georgia with the Fulbright grant. His research interests are on political behavior and political communication. His articles are published in the British Journal of Political Science, European Political Science Review, and Southeast European and Black Sea Studies.