Exploring the Ideological Landscape of X/Twitter Users in Türkiye: Political and Cultural Axes

This study analyzes Türkiye's political landscape by harnessing Computational Social Science techniques to parse extensive data about public ideologies from the Project_Name database. Unlike existing theoretical frameworks that focus on the ideologies of political elites and cadres, this study examines public ideologies in a contentious political manner. Exploiting an AI-based data generation pipeline on digital traces, it distills the eight most prevalent ideologies down to the city level and employs exploratory statistical analyses. Principal Component Analysis delineates two fundamental axes: the traditional left-right political spectrum and a separate spectrum of secular-religious inclination, encompassing both political and cultural dimensions. Then, the Cluster Analysis reveals three distinct groups: left-leaning and religiously inclined, centre-right-leaning and religiously inclined, and those with a centre-right-leaning focus and a pronounced secular orientation. The outcomes provide valuable insights into the political and cultural axes within political society, offering a clearer understanding of the most recent ideological and political climate in Türkiye.