Rethinking political attitudes through values in Türkiye beyond the narrative of mainstream sociology

This article argues that political attitudes in Türkiye are best understood not through coherent ideologies or normative belief systems but through the dynamic, embodied and affect-laden formations of value. In contrast to mainstream sociology, which presumes stable value structures underpinning political behaviour, this study shows that values in Türkiye function less as normative anchors and more as relational resources shaped by unconscious identifications, bodily dispositions and symbolic performances. Drawing on interdisciplinary insights from psychoanalysis, Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, Actor–Network Theory and narrative approaches, the article traces how values are enacted and contested through everyday practices: jokes, rituals, media symbols, gendered codes and shifting alliances. Rather than reflecting rational interests or ideological coherence, these practices reveal how political agency is constituted through ambiguity, contradiction and affective attachment. In the absence of a shared symbolic order, values acquire political salience not by offering moral clarity but by suturing fragmented subjectivities into temporary imaginaries of coherence. By foregrounding the performative and psychosocial dynamics of value, the article calls for a rethinking of political sociology – one that abandons assumptions of structural integration and instead listens to how values ‘speak’ in their own volatile, situated and symbolically charged grammar.