Introduction

The link between public opinion and public policy has been fundamental for the study of public policy analysis, as the policy preferences of the electorate are considered central in policy-making in representative democracies (Powell, 2000). In such democracies, politicians are expected to be responsive toward citizens’ wishes and demands, and to follow public preferences as they change (Wlezien and Soroka, 2009). Previous research exploring the relationship between public opinion and public policy has documented well that policy-makers are attentive to public opinion and respond to changes in public policy preferences. A vast amount of earlier research has illustrated that the voting behaviour of members of the Congress in the US is guided in part by the policy preferences of their constituency (Miller and Stokes, 1963; Kuklinski, 1977; Mayhew, 2004), the majority of policies introduced in representative democracies are congruent with the aggregate policy preferences of citizens (Monroe, 1979, 1998), and changes in public opinion are important drivers of policy change (Page and Shapiro, 1983). While these earlier studies established the link between public opinion and policymaking in representative democracies, they further focused on the circumstances under which public preferences play a larger role in shaping public policies.

A substantial body of previous research has highlighted the centrality of the issue of saliency in explaining the relationship between public policy preferences and policy responsiveness. Briefly defined as the importance that citizens attach to an issue, issue saliency is found to be mediating the opinion–policy link. Previous studies have demonstrated that citizens are more likely to pay attention to the political discussions and behaviours of politicians on those issues that they find important (Edwards et al, 1995; Lindaman and Haider-Markel, 2002), and politicians are more likely to be responsive towards citizens’ demands when the issues at hand are salient to the public (Monroe, 1998; Hill and Hurley, 1999; Burnstein, 2003). Therefore, the public opinion and policy link is expected to be stronger for those salient issue domains when compared with issues that are not salient to the public.

This chapter focuses on the political attitudes and policy preferences of Turkish citizens in various salient policy domains. To this end, we make use of several public opinion surveys conducted in Turkey during the period between 1990 and 2015, and organise our findings in to two main sections. In the first section we introduce general attitudes towards politics in Turkey.