Mémoire
| Résumé : | The motives that lead to politicization is associated with the Political Opportunity Structure (POS) of political actors. Within this context, this study aims to explore the politicization of immigration in Turkey during the preceding six months of the local elections in 2019. Two distinct dimensions constitute politicization, namely salience and polarization. These could be extracted from the political claims found within news articles extracted from newspapers. The unique aspect of the local elections, when some electoral areas exhibited political alignments while some did not, made us question how the POS influenced the politicization level of migration in these areas. After a comparative analysis through the application of a political claims analysis on the carefully selected areas, we observed a significant degree of compliance with our expectations. While areas with lower political alignments demonstrated higher politicization rate, the areas with higher political alignments showed a lower politicization rate. The “top-down” channel of politicization was clearly observable, which was a crucial condition to justify the causal relationship. |
