No abstract

Can the recognition of a minority language by the state, such as the increasing use of the minority language in state services, help the state to build political trust among its minority citizens? Or, does it rather strengthen the ethnic divisions in the country? Despite the significance of the language policy, especially in countries experiencing ongoing ethnic conflict, the empirical literature on its causal effects stay limited. In this study, we explore the effects of the minority language recognition n minority individuals' political attitudes in an authoritarian country experiencing an ongoing ethnic conflict, i.e, Turkey. We conducted a pre-registered online survey experiment, recruiting Kurdish citizens of Turkey. Our results point to a recognition paradox. While the Kurdish people living in Turkey become more satisfied with state services if these services are presented in the Kurdish language, this satisfaction does not lead to increased trust in state institutions. On the other hand, the recognition of the minority language further increases ethnic demands in language policy. We believe that our results make significant contribution to the literature on ethnic politics.

The bargaining model has emerged as a progressive, analytic, and persuasive explanation of war; yet, it has some limitations and weaknesses that need improvement. In this study, the potential strength and weaknesses of the bargaining model of war, as well as its applications are discussed. More specifically, this paper reviews the emergence, causal mechanisms, and modifications of the bargaining model of war by concentrating on its up-to-date applications to war. This paper argues that bargaining model gives us a conspicuous explanation concerning the war, even though the theory suffers from some deficits; particularly on the logic of its mechanism, the problem of disagreement, uncertainty, "take it or leave it" protocol, rationality and risk aversion of the actor. The bargaining model of war is still progressing; nonetheless, these problems allow us to have a persuasive but limited and even partially misleading explanation of war. Benefiting from the psychological and domestic explanations of war, the explanatory power of the theory might be enhanced.

Media assistance has arisen as a significant tool of media development and democracy initiatives, particularly in the last 20 years. While the research in foreign aid and democracy aid is rich, studies on media assistance are quite limited in number due to its novelty. Moreover, existing research on media assistance usually focuses on the role and/or impact of media assistance on recipient nations' media capacity or media independence. Differing from this existing research, this study focuses on the donors of media assistance and asks how generous foreign aid donors are in media development and what type of donors provide media assistance. Using data from the OECD, Freedom House, Reporters Without Borders, and Comparative Political dataset, this study finds that democratic countries, countries with higher independence in their media, and governments with center ideology are more likely to provide a higher amount of media assistance compared to others.