In the United States it seems like you can’t do anything these days without being asked to partake in a survey. These range from the practical email survey from an airline asking you to rate the service on a recent flight (VERDICT: fair, verging on poor), to the mundane survey question posed on your friend’s Facebook profile (VERDICT: Diet Coke is better than Diet Pepsi). Simply put, surveys are a staple of our everyday lives. In the policy arena as well, the US government, think tanks, and NGOs have regularly used surveys to gather data on various topics in an effort to better delineate policy priorities.
It now seems that Turkey is picking up on the trend.
The Turkish government recently announced that it would carry out a major survey on the public’s attitude toward religious issues. According to a recent article in Hurriyet Daily News, the survey will ask tens of thousands of Turkish citizens about their opinion on public institutions, the headscarf issue, religious classes in schools, Alevi demands, the relationship between the government and religion, and the Religious Affairs Directorate’s (Diyanet) areas of service.
Given that these social issues are the main cause of dispute in Turkish domestic politics, the announcement of the survey has stirred some concern about the integrity of how it will be conducted and what the results will be used for. The results will not be examined, reportedly, until after the general elections in June. In a perfect world the survey would be conducted in an unbiased manner and the results would not be manipulated, but many – particularly Turkey’s secularists – fear this will not be the case.
But rather than debating the intentions of the survey, Turkey’s secular opposition should be figuring out how it can best respond to the survey results, regardless of what they may be. If surveys are meant to help develop policy based on public sentiment, then the three minority parties in Parliament – the Republican People’s Party (CHP), the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), and the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) – should use this opportunity to reformulate certain aspects of their platforms.
If the results of a recently completed survey by Kadir Has University in Istanbul are any indication, some policy adjustments couldn’t hurt. Around 75 percent of respondents said the main opposition (i.e. CHP) had no policy stances that they supported. At the same time, however, only 26.5 percent of respondents said they trusted the AKP government, a drop from 44 percent in June 2010.
Although it appears certain that the AKP will emerge victorious from the general election scheduled for this June, the opposition may come away stronger than it did four years ago. How opposition parties maneuver public sentiment going forward will have an impact on their future ambitions. The AKP government’s upcoming survey has the potential to offer the opposition a more comprehensive glimpse of public sentiment.
Published Date: January 13, 2011