1551 - THE SEARCH FOR DEMOCRATIC VALUES IN TÜRKIYE: ANALYSIS OF GOOGLE TRENDS

Session: D11S003 - Democracy & Trust 1
AUTHORS:
Uyar Suiçmez Tugba (Baskent University ~ Ankara ~ Turkey)
Abstract text:
Examining how citizens interact with democratic values on the World Wide Web would provide insight for applied areas of psychology. The current research aims to collect information about the popularity of democratic values, such as Freedom, Equality, and Justice in Türkiye, and uses the Google Trends tool, which is a public website that offers data based on Google Search that shows how frequently a particular search term is entered in comparison with all other search terms in different regions and languages. Parallel to the research aim, Türkiye was chosen as a region, and the years between 2020-2025 were selected as the time range to observe the flow. As a result, it is evident that in 2020, these three democratic values were viewed as distinct terms, with Justice being the most popular. Moreover, when examining the trends, it is evident that in 2023, all three terms started to be searched at the same level of popularity. Specifically, Freedom remained at a moderate level for five years, excluding interim periods. Additionally, Justice remained at a moderate to high level for five years, excluding interim periods. Equality, on the other hand, was the least popular search term until 2023, but its search popularity increased dramatically thereafter. Although there was a partial loss of popularity at the end of the approximately one-year period, it was observed that the three terms were still searched with very similar frequency. These changes, given importance to democratic values as seen in the flow of Google Trends, suggest a dynamic nature of them in Türkiye. These quantitative results, however, need to be evaluated in a context. To achieve this aim, all the results will be discussed by evaluating them in the context of data from news sources related to political perspectives and economic developments, thereby providing a contextual framework.