Supporting Shari’a in a Secular State: Understanding Public Opinion in Turkey | Ali Çarkoğlu

Public support for Shari’a has always been a politically sensitive issue in Muslim-majority countries. Who are the supporters of Shari’a rule, and what are their social and political preferences and attitudes? Dr. Çarkoğlu investigates these questions using more than a dozen nationally representative survey samples from Turkey. The Shari’a support group has distinct party and policy preferences and attitudinal formations. He underlines the critical role of education in these relationships and evaluate the vastly unknown motivations of the Shari’a support group.

Ali Çarkoğlu is currently a professor of political science at Koc University-Istanbul. He received his Ph.D. at the State University of New York-Binghamton in 1994. He previously taught at Boğaziçi and Sabancı universities in Istanbul. He was a resident fellow in 2008-2009 at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS). He has held visiting positions at the Center for Political Studies of the University of Michigan (2017-2018), Institute for Social Research and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law of the Freeman Spogli Institute of Stanford University (2024-2025). His areas of research interest include voting behavior, elections, public opinion and party politics in Turkey. He is the founding director of the Center for Survey Research (https://csr.ku.edu.tr/home) and the Center for Civil Society and Philanthropy Research (https://kusitham.ku.edu.tr/). He is on the editorial board of Turkish Studies, South European Society and Politics and Insight Turkey. His most recent book co-authored with Ersin Kalaycıoğlu appeared from the University of Michigan Press: Fragile but Resilient? Turkish Electoral Dynamics, 2002-2015 (2021). Both authors co-edited Elections and public opinion in Turkey: Through the prism of the 2018 elections (2021), Routledge.