Sabri Ciftci

Kansas State University | KSU · Department of Political Science

Turkish foreign policy has taken a military turn in recent years. Turkey is now a major arms exporter, it hosts military bases in its neighborhood and beyond, and has engaged in conflicts in Syria and Libya. Scholars have highlighted identity and international system theories to explain the military assertiveness in Turkish foreign policy. This stu...

Read Only Full Text: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/author/P4DPKIMSAXFHQEFDJRDP?target=10.1111/jssr.12778 Collectivism-individualism framework is widely employed to explain differences in economic development and democratization. However, little empirical work has been done about the religious microfoundations of this framework. This study...

Open Access Full text: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/52810. Justice ( al-‘adl) is one of the principal values of the Islamic faith. In Islam, Justice, and Democracy, Sabri Ciftci explores the historical, philosophical, and empirical foundations of justice to examine how religious values relate to Muslim political preferences and b...

This is a review essay and discussion of Nostalgia for the Empire

This study aims to construct reliable measures of religiosity and to cross-validate survey-based measures in operationalization of this central variable. We obtain measures of sub-national religiosity in the Egyptian governorates from the Arab Barometer surveys using disaggregation and multilevel regression and post-stratification techniques. Then,...

This paper highlights the intraparty institutional dynamics at play that influence Islamist party moderation and its manifest behaviour and ideology. We conceive of moderation as a strategically contingent act that is best explained by intraparty realities operating within particular political dynamics. This shifts the focus from the inclusion/mode...

This chapter examines the outcomes of Turkish foreign policy strategies in Palestine in relation to both international and domestic political factors. More specifically, it looks at the AKP era foreign policy and the outcomes of Turkish soft power strategies in Palestine. Historically, Turkish-Palestinian relations were greatly shaped by Turkey's s...

This study seeks to explain why, to what extent, and in what ways ethnic party representatives remain active on the parliamentary floor when political representation of minority groups takes place alongside ethnic conflict. To test hypotheses related to these questions, we utilize an original dataset of 14,000 parliamentary questions and speeches a...

Egalitarian preferences and benevolence are significant elements of Islamic social justice, which is one of the main pillars of Islam's ethico-political system. Surprisingly, empirical investigations about attitudinal implications of Islamic social justice values are rare. This is one of the first studies examining the correlations between Islam, s...

Despite a wealth of studies examining Muslim religiosity and democracy, uncertainty regarding Islam and attitudes toward democracy remains. Although the claims concerning the incompatibility of Islam and democracy are generally discarded, public opinion scholarship has yet to build much further from this important first step or incorporate a strong...

This study examines the micro foundations of political support in Arab polities. Most Arab states rank highly in aggregate human development or economic wealth, but they lag behind in democracy defying the predictions of modernization theory. Modernization and human development perspective implies that increased resources and self-expression values...

Why do representatives prioritize certain types of constituency service in parliamentary systems? This study argues that the choice for constituency-oriented activities is conditioned by both partisan factors and legislative role orientations. Two novel data sets combining behavioral and attitudinal measures of constituency-oriented behavior are us...

This study examines why ordinary people sympathize with a terrorist network in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Holding literalist religious outlook resonating with al-Qaeda’s marginal interpretation of Islam constant, it is maintained that anti-Americanism and its varieties matter a great deal in explaining attitudes toward al-Qaeda. Using...

Objectives This article examines cross‐national variation in interreligious favorability across the globe. We develop and test several hypotheses linking globalization to attitudes toward the religious other through mechanisms of religious belonging and contact. Methods Utilizing cross‐national data in 20 countries from the Pew Global Attitudes Su...

This study presents the first systematic analysis of the public opinion dimension of soft power competition in the contemporary Middle East. Building on the scholarship on perceptions of foreign states and Arab public opinion, it proposes a series of hypotheses about sectarian identity, religious worldviews, and anti-Americanism as determinants of...

In this article, we examine the patterns of civic engagement in non-democratic and democratizing polities of the Arab world. The theoretical argument incorporates two perspectives: modernization theory and utilitarianism. Specifically, we use wasta-seeking behaviour and indicators of human capital and citizen empowerment to explain the micro-level...

The prior policymaking literature has been largely theoretical and focused upon agenda setting and the initiation mechanisms of policy change, namely triggering events. Notably absent from the prior literature have been studies aimed at developing and empirically evaluating models of policymaking as a process with outcomes. Such a process/outcome m...

This paper focuses on the relationship between social identity based on national, religious, or international affiliations and attitudes toward foreign policy in the Turkish context. Evidence is drawn from an original survey conducted among university students in Turkey. The results show that students' social identity has a significant correlation...

Over the last two decades a large literature has developed examining the determinants of public support for the European Union. While these studies have focused on developing explanations of support for the EU, only a few studies have looked below this general level of support and examined attitudes regarding specific EU institutions. In the curren...

Public opinion polls demonstrate that Arab citizens support both democracy and shari'a. I argue that individual values related to the secular-Islamist cleavage are instrumental in explaining this joint support. The analysis of the Arab Barometer Survey shows that individuals holding Islamic values are more favorable of shari'a, whereas those with s...

This article investigates the determinants of anti-Muslim sentiment in the West. Starting from the premise that Islamophobic attitudes are more nuanced than a simple dislike of Muslims, I focus on specific forms of attitudes which link Muslims to violence and terrorism. Data from the Pew Global Attitudes Surveys are used to test three theories: per...

This article explains the determinants of individual support for democracy in 10 Muslim-majority countries. Starting with economic and cultural interpretations of modernization theory, the author advances an argument exploring cross-linkages between macro- and micro-level implications of this theory as they relate to attitudes toward democracy. The...

Increasing scholarly attention has recently been focused upon the origins and fortunes of Islamicparties. This paper examines the individual determinants of support for these parties utilizing the fifth wave of the World Values Survey. It is argued that the distribution of individual preferences along political cleavages like left‐right, secularism...

Attitudes towards immigrants are determined by both interests (immigrants are taking my job) and values (immigrants are taking my country). While these individual attributes (e.g., education, occupation, and national attachment) are a useful first step in predicting citizens’ anti-immigrant attitudes, it is also important to control for the nationa...

In the USA, scholars have developed theories to explain the role of legislative committees, but these theories have not been widely tested outside the USA. This ambivalence results from the perception that the strength of political parties in parliamentary systems undermines the importance of other legislative institutions, including the committees...

In the USA, scholars have developed theories to explain the role of legislative committees, but these theories have not been widely tested outside the USA. This ambivalence results from the perception that the strength of political parties in parliamentary systems undermines the importance of other legislative institutions, including the committees...

Scholarly research investigating the determinants of support for European integration at the individual level is abundant, but the analysis of aggregate-level indicators is relatively less developed. This study examines the collective responses of the Europeans to different environments of integration by using a multiple interrupted time series des...

This project investigates the role of the “context” in explaining support for European integration. The main goal of the dissertation is to assess the formative effect of time and space (i.e. context) on individual attitudes. Firs, the project introduces the meaning and importance of support in the European Union. Next, a theoretical framework, reg...