Europeanization of public sphere in Turkey: changes between 2003-2013

150 pagesEuropean Public Sphere and Europeanization of public spheres has been an interest for the EU countries for the last two decades. There have been different approaches regarding how to measure it, in the end measuring Europeanization in each of different national public spheres became the dominant approach. In Turkey, there are no researches which measure how the Europeanization trend of the Turkish public sphere changed in time. Although not a member of EU, Turkey has been a part of European integration for the last 60 years. While Turkey-EU accession negotiations still go on, their pace slowed down in the last years. The hypothesis of this thesis is that Europeanization of Turkish public sphere increased between the years 2003 and 2008, and declined as Turkish government shifted its focus away from and the negotiations came to a halt. As one of the methods for measuring Europeanization of public spheres is analyzing the content in the newspapers, the research will analyze the newspapers between 2003-2013 in order to understand the frequency of the EU related newspaper content. This research will also focus on the voice of the media itself by analyzing the columns on national newspapers