Civic Culture and Support for Democracy amongst Kurds in Iran, Iraq, and Turkey

Abstract

Theories of civic culture and democratization have tended to ignore stateless nations like the Kurds. This brings up the question of what civic culture looks like for these groups and whether the status of statelessness has influenced the civic culture of Kurds in Iran, Iraq, and Turkey. Analyzing the first merged large-N dataset including Kurds from Turkey, Iran, and Iraq, this paper shows that the last hundred years of Kurdish political movements have strongly influenced the civic culture of Kurds. Being Kurdish in Turkey, Iran, and Iraq has a significant effect on levels of political trust and support as well as the correlation of these indicators with levels of support for a democratic political system. Overall, this paper finds that being Kurdish has a strong positive effect on support for democracy versus autocracy in all three countries.

Keywords

• Kurds
• civic culture
• democratization
• stateless nations