85
JOURNAL OF YOUTH RESEARCHES
A Research About the Youngs’ Voting Behavior in Local Elections: The Case of 2009, Ankara Metropolitan Municipality Election
Table 7: Analysis of Inter-Factor Correlation Affecting Voting for a Local Candidate
(Pearson’s R)
Factors
Candidate’s
Character
and Party
Political
Conjuncture
and Success
Environmental
Trend
Media and
Communication
Candidate’s
Character and Party
1
Political Conjuncture
and Success
213**
1
Environmental Trend
343**
452**
1
Media and
Communication
461**
261**
375**
1
Arithmetic Mean
3.43
3.12
3.19
3.27
Standard Deviation
0.52
0.84
0.61
0.67
Note:**p<.01. Source: Damlapınar and Balcı, 2014:257.
As seen in Table 6 and Table 7, the most important factor that voters are affected when
voting in the local election is the character of the candidate and the candidate’s party.
This factor, which consist of 16.03 percent of the total variance, its the eigenvalue is 7.52.
Also reliability coefficient Cronbach’s is α = .873
Conclusion
Elections are one of the most important building blocks of democratic life. The views of
the younger generation, which is the assurance of our future, today can clearly show the
line of our future governments. This study, which aims to measure the behavior of young
people in local elections, benefited from the work applied to 1117 people after the local
elections on 29 March 2009. Using secondary data, four hypotheses were tested in the
context of the research question.
The candidate’s service experience and projects affect young voters’ voting behavior po-
sitively, as expressed in H1, and this hypothesis was found to be effective and confirmed
in terms of voting by young voters in terms of the candidate’s self-expression. Young
participants have the lowest values in influencing the promises of the candidate and the
party as expressed in H2 and it has been observed that young voters do not seem to
care much about candidate and party promises, and this hypothesis was not confirmed.
