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The Turkish presidential election in 2023 marked a pivotal moment for the ruling Justice and Development Party and Erdoğan, grappling with criticism over their handling of the economic crisis. Six parties formed the Nation Alliance to challenge the incumbent, but negotiations for the alliance's presidential candidate collapsed, leading to the breakdown of the alliance. This study analyzes the divided opposition and its difficulty in nominating a likeable candidate as another reason for the continuation of President Erdoğan's rule. A Response Surface Analysis (RSA) approach is utilized to describe the potential outcomes of the options that opposition parties considered regarding their presidential candidate. The analysis shows that the leader of the Republican People's Party, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, was weaker in appealing to the centre-right wing voters of the alliance partner, the Good Party, yet fared better in gathering the support of the Kurdish voter base of the Peoples' Democratic Party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of populism presents a challenge to liberal democracy in various countries. This article questions how populist attitudes affect the democratic preferences of the electorate. Using representative survey data fielded from Turkey in 2019, we first tested the effect of populist attitudes on illiberal democratic attitudes. The results show the negative impact of populism on support for illiberal democratic attitudes. Next, we analyzed which dimension of populism correlates with illiberal democratic preferences. Our results pointed to the negative influence of the Manichean outlook on preferences concerning democracy. Contrary to expectations, as anti-elitist and people-centric attitudes increase, support for illiberal democracy decreases. Hence, the relative emphasis on different dimensions of populism is likely to shape the net balance of its influence on democracy. Electoral alliance preferences also shape democracy preferences. The ruling People's Alliance voters are more supportive of illiberal democracy than the opposition blocs and parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article evaluates how and which political parties adopted populist notions from the late Ottoman Empire to contemporary Turkish politics. As such, our study considers populism as a thin-centered ideology. In the light of this definition, which allows broadening the scope for observational research, we examined the history of populism in Turkey along with the concepts of the people, the elites, and the people's will. Our review puts forward three distinct concepts of "people" in populism in Turkey. These conceptualizations cover "the ordinary people" of the Republican People's Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi-CHP) during the 1970s on the left, "the will of the people" and "commonsense of the people" adopted by the center-right parties since the 1950s, and "Islamic people" embraced by the National Outlook (Milli Görüş) on the right since 1969. The definition of elites positioned against the people in Turkey varies depending on whether political parties are in power and where they fall on the ideological right-left spectrum. In the recent period, the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi-AK Parti) has brought a new identity to Turkish populism by blending the lines of the Democrat Party (Demokrat Parti-DP) and Justice Party (Adalet Partisi-AP) and the approach of National Outlook. In this context, the definition of the elite against the people ranges from exclusive-authoritarian rulers in domestic politics to external enemies in international politics and their domestic collaborators. Overall, our historical analysis demonstrates that populist notions in Turkey is not restricted to a single political party or ideology. Such a historical analysis will provide a significant resource for further quantitative and qualitative analyses. We also anticipate that putting forward the development of populism over time and across the left-right ideological spectrum in Turkey will theoretically as well as empirically contribute to other comparative studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing popularity of online news and social media sites has made it more difficult than ever to control the flow of information. However, governments across the world are successfully continuing to restrict access to content that adversely affects their interests. This study examines the determinants of public support for censorship, as public support is likely to influence governments' ability to regulate information. Using the Balance Theory and nationally representative survey data from Turkey, we analyze the support for censorship of both online and offline media. Our results suggest that pro-censorship attitudes are positively associated with peoples' sympathy for the censor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does a dramatic shift in political context that renders security concerns the most salient electoral issue influence voting? To address this question, we take advantage of the peculiar timing of elections and heightened terror attacks in Turkey with the use of original panel data. The June 2015 Turkish general election resulted in a hung parliament, and a snap election was held in November. While the period before June was relatively calm, the inter-election period witnessed an upsurge of terror attacks and casualties. A three-wave panel enables us to track how voters' electoral preferences changed over this period. Our analyses suggest that the terror attacks led voters to prioritize parties' perceived competence in addressing security concerns at the ballot box. The abrupt change in issue salience has bolstered support for the incumbent Justice and Development Party which was evaluated by voters as more competent than other parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) are used in elections across the globe and offer voters nonpartisan information about political parties, candidates, and policy issues. Several studies suggest that VAAs affect vote choice as well as political knowledge. However, despite the vast literature on VAAs, online voting advice technology's impact on authoritarian regimes, where the cost of accessing expert advice is much higher than in democracies, remains unknown. In this study, we present results from a randomized experiment that evaluates the effects of a VAA intervention on voter attitudes and choices in Turkey—a typical competitive authoritarian regime where elections take place, but the rules are skewed in favor of the regime. We embedded a VAA intervention in a face-to-face panel survey conducted before and after the 2019 local elections in Istanbul, Turkey. Using a representative sample of Turkish adults in Istanbul, we randomly assigned half of the participants to our VAA intervention consisting of exposure to their political standing on a two-dimensional map of political candidates. Our analysis demonstrates that the VAA intervention influences candidate choice, mainly among centrist voters. However, these effects are short-term and dissipate within two months. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarly research about philanthropy has de-emphasized informal giving to friends, neighbors and others in need. Yet, informal giving is a critical element of philanthropy, particularly in settings with less well-developed civil society institutions. This paper examines informal giving in Turkey, based on two surveys of Turkish citizens conducted in 2004 and 2015. The surveys find much higher levels of informal giving than formal giving, though the level of informal giving decreased between 2004 and 2015. Donors directed their giving more to family member and others in need than to neighbors. In contrast to studies from most other countries, Turks overwhelmingly prefer giving to individuals rather than institutions. Determinants of informal giving, however, are largely consistent with other research on the motivations for giving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper charts the nature of political cleavage between major parties in post-Arab Spring elections in five Mediterranean region countries, with data from online opt-in surveys. We compare the Moroccan elections, held under a consolidated authoritarian regime, with the transitional cases of Tunisia and Egypt as well as the more mature democracies of Turkey and Israel. Voter opinions are obtained on 30 salient issues, and parties and voters are aligned along two dimensions. We trace country-specific cleavage patterns and reflections of party system maturity in these five countries. The cases of Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco reveal that in less settled cleavage structures there is little congruence between vote propensities for parties and agreement levels with policy positions compared to the more institutionalized democracies of Israel and Turkey where voters exhibit a higher likelihood to vote for a party as the distance between the voter and the party in the policy space gets smaller. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Moving beyond the analytical characteristics of apportionment methods or election systems, this article focuses on their outcomes in practice. We illustrate how apportionment and partisan biases working with a high threshold created an electoral environment conducive to the establishment of a predominant party system. We use the historical example of the Turkish experience. We trace the historical development of disproportionality for the entire multi-party elections for the 1950–2015 period. Focusing on the five most recent elections of this period since 2002, we demonstrate how the biases introduced by the apportionment method in use and the 10% threshold have advantaged the leading Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi , AKP). Our study suggests that a partisan bias favoring AKP still continues to exist at a lower level even after correcting the apportionment and the threshold biases. We underline how these biases form the foundation for a conservative over-representation and emphasize the path-dependent dynamics that keep challengers to the AKP away from the electoral scene, effectively helping to continue its hegemonic position in the system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Threat perceptions and prejudice underlie a large number of intergroup conflicts. In this article we explore prejudicial attitudes in Turkey regarding ethnic Kurdish and devout Muslim religious identities as opposed to Turkish and less observant, secular identities. Utilizing a population-based survey experiment, we use vignettes about a hypothetical family as a neighbour, with randomized ethnicity and religiosity-related cues. We find evidence for prejudice against Kurdish ethnicity, especially among older, lowly-educated and economically dissatisfied individuals. The level of prejudice against Kurds does not seem to be related to the relative size of the Kurdish population in the local population. We do not observe prejudice against devout Muslim or less observant, secular identities. Our findings indicate that prejudice against Kurds in Turkey does not have a sui generis nature. The lack of prejudice across the religiosity dimension suggests that major socio-political cleavages do not necessarily affect intergroup attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we first present a background to the watershed elections of 2018, describing the context preceding the elections. In order to explain the changes and continuities in the geographic patterns of the 2018 elections, we present ballot-box and district level data from 2018 and previous elections. We refer to long-term ideological/cultural differences as well as short-term evaluations about security and the economy in shaping the 2018 election results. Even in the face of various important developments, radical changes in the geographic voting patterns do not appear to have taken place. The incumbent AK Party and its leader, President Erdoğan, continued to have an electoral edge over competitors in regions that mostly overlap with those observed in earlier elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many parliamentary democracies feature a president alongside a prime minister. While these presidents have a nonpartisan status as head of state, they often have had long political careers with partisan affiliations before assuming office. How do voters react when such actors make issue statements to shape public opinion? Are such statements filtered through voters’ partisan lenses, provoked by the partisan background of these actors? Or perhaps partisan reactions are not invoked, owing to the nonpartisan status of the office? We argue that voters’ reactions depend on the issue domain. Partisan reactions will be invoked only when the statements are about issues outside the president’s prerogatives. We provide evidence for our argument from a population-based survey experiment in Turkey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can the media influence vote choice when the media and the party system are highly polarized, and vote shifts are infrequent? We argue affirmatively that media significantly influences vote choice even in such systems. First, we show that information filtered through the media has an independent effect on vote choice. Second, we link respondents’ newspaper choices in the pre-election survey with the favorability of major political parties in their newspapers during the campaign period. Third, we provide rich empirical data from media content and voter surveys. Our analyses suggest that media content has a significant effect in influencing party support and vote switches during the campaign periods of four general elections between 2002 and 2015 in the increasingly polarized setting of Turkey. We further break down this effect to study how favorable coverage and visibility influence party support differently among partisan loyalists and switchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Past enlargements of the European Union (EU) have demonstrated that public attitudes on European integration can influence the course of accession processes. Beyond the literature on public EU support in member states and former candidates, the dynamics that shape public attitudes on EU membership within recent candidate countries have not been systematically examined. Analysing nine Eurobarometer (EB) surveys from 2004 to 2011, we argue that evaluations of EU membership in Croatia, Macedonia and Turkey are shaped by utilitarian considerations, belief in various political institutions as well as the fear of losing national identity. The economic crisis of 2008 has changed public opinion towards EU membership in all three countries, but Turkey appears to have been affected the most compared to Croatia and Macedonia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyzes the two general elections in 2015 that followed the local and presidential elections a year earlier. These elections illustrate how a predominant party builds its electoral base, loses, and then recovers votes to consolidate its support base. We demonstrate geographical patterns of voting across the country to illustrate how the electoral scene shifted in less than four months. We discuss the power and limitations of performance politics as a force that shapes electoral outcomes in contexts where security concerns override concerns about economic and social policy performance. We argue that lacking or diminished influence of performance politics is inherently harmful for Turkish democracy and given the divided nature of the electorate a consensus building approach to policy reform and constitution writing is more likely to succeed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are a country’s environmental attitudes linked to its level of economic development? In recent decades, rapid industrialization and the use of cheaper but older production technologies have reduced environmental quality in less developed countries (LDCs). Moreover, these countries have been disproportionally affected by global pollution in that they suffer the effects while having emitted less than industrialized countries. To what extent are people in LDCs ready to make sacrifices to improve environmental conditions? International Social Survey Program 2010 data reveal that people in LDCs are less supportive of international agreements forcing their country to take necessary environmental measures than are citizens in the developed world. Moreover, they are more likely to think that wealthier countries should make more effort to protect the environment, and are less willing to make personal economic sacrifices or change their consumption behavior to accommodate environmental concerns. These results hold even after controlling for post-materialist values, political ideology, personal income, and several other demographic variables. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The aim of this article is to examine press-party parallelism during the 2011 national elections in Turkey. The article reports findings from a content analysis of 9,127 news articles and editorial columns from fifteen newspapers regarding the trajectory of press-party parallelism over the course of the twelve-week national elections campaign period. We focus on two indicators of press-party parallelism: (I) respective "voice" given to the two leading parties, calculated as the ratio of news that quoted sources from the incumbent Adalet ve Kalkmma Partisi (AKP) to the leading opposition party Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi (CHP) and (2) news articles' tones toward AKP and CHP. The newspapers that were content analyzed were first categorized into three groups based on survey data regarding the voting intentions of their readers: (I) a group of "conservative" newspapers whose readers intended to vote primarily for AKP, (2) a group of "mainstream broadsheets," and (3) a group of "opposition" newspapers with a readership base intending to vote for CHP. The findings suggest that over the course of the election campaign, internal pluralism in both conservative and opposition papers declined in terms of voice given to respective parties and tone of news coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The March 2014 local elections in Turkey did not drastically alter electoral balances in Turkey. The AK Party maintained its predominant position, despite loosing some electoral support. he opposition gained some support but not enough to challenge the incumbent party's tenure. Despite apparent gains for the CHP, it appears that the most significant vote increase was obtained by the nationalist MHP. Yet, both opposition parties remain far from imposing a credible challenge to the AK Party in future elections. These results are likely to lure PM Erdogan into running for president. Such a decision is likely to further polarize the country and result in negative electoral campaigns for the presidential elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Turkish elections reflect two competing influences. One concerns a long-term increasingly conservative ideological orientation; the other, more short-term pragmatic evaluations primarily on the economic policy front. This article uses three nationwide representative surveys from 2002, 2007 and 2011 to assess the relative merits of these competing hypotheses. The findings indicate that the critical election of 2002 is not shaped by economic performance evaluations but rather by indicators of ideology at large and left–right ideology in particular. The influence of ideology appears to rise from 2002 to 2007 and 2011. Economic performance evaluations increase in salience from 2002 to 2007 but seem to have somewhat lost their power for 2011. Implications of these findings for the Turkish party system and further research questions are discussed in the concluding section. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Since 2002, the Turkish electoral environment and the party system have been undergoing a significant transformation. The Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) has continued to increase its electoral support for a third time in a row. The declining volatility and fractionalization in the election results together with the expanding geographical base of AKP electoral support may be taken as signs of the emergence of a dominant party system in Turkey. This article offers a descriptive account of the election results and links those results to the literature on the dominant party system. A discussion on the implications of this new development for the evolution of Turkish party system, Turkish political landscape and future elections concludes the article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to measure the level of partisanship for readers of major newspapers in Turkey. In so doing partisan alignments of those newspapers as reflected in the party preferences of their readers are diagnosed. Alternatively, different levels of pluralism as reflective of newspaper outlets within different party supporters are also depicted. Using micro-individual level survey data it is shown that while internal pluralism within newspaper readership communities is declining, the external pluralism is on the rise. Decreasing internal pluralism indicates increasing bias in individual media outlets towards particular political parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various published reports within the issue, including one by Fuat Keyman that discusses Turkish media and democracy, one by Murat Somer that examines Turkish newspaper coverage of political issues and one by Salih Bayram that discusses historical trends in political parallelism form the late Ottoman Empire to the 2002 elections.

The article focuses on the ban of wearing religious headscarf or türban among women in Turkey. It explores the political background and controversy of türban ban in which its says that regulatory on the religious head-covering practices among women in Turkey had originated in the start of multi-party democracy during the post-World War II. It relates the case of medical student Leyla Şahin in the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) about her situation of not attending her studies at Istanbul University because of wearing head cover. It discusses the support of the people of the türban ban in Turkey it which its says that the ban is not commonly supported by the people.

This article presents a descriptive account of the March 2009 local elections in Turkey and offers a nation-wide and regional evaluation of trends in Turkish elections since 2004. The results of these analyses suggest that, although the AKP's rise in support has stalled, it remains the dominant political party in Turkish politics. However, a regionally differentiated analysis shows that significant differences can be observed between the more developed western coastal regions, where the opposition parties received a lot of support, and the eastern and southeastern provinces, where parties that represent the ethnic Kurdish minority have seen rising support. In between these two areas, the AKP continues to dominate in the more conservative provinces, followed by the MHP. The article emphasizes the worsening economic conditions as the main factor that shaped these developments, and underlines the geographically advantageous positioning of the MHP which may mount a credible opposition to the AKP in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The July 2007 general elections took place in an atmosphere of polarization around debates concerning the changing nature of the Turkish political regime. The election victory for the incumbent Justice and Development Party (AKP) seemed to depend on two competing sources of influence upon voters in their choice for political parties. One was primarily long-term ideological orientations built on left-right self-placement, religiosity, and conservatism. The other was relatively short-term evaluations of government performance, especially on the economic front. This essay evaluates these two branches of influence upon voters' choice, using survey data collected before and after the July election. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the papers within the June 2008 issue of "Turkish Studies," including one on the election system in Turkey, and another on the likely determinants of vote choices in the 2007 elections in Turkey.

The article discusses the results of the July 2007 general elections in Turkey. It relates the victory of the Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi (AKP) or the Justice and Development Party in the preceding November 2002 Turkish general elections. Information is presented on the failure of the AKP government which came to power in 2002 to achieve success in economic policy. In the July 2007 elections, the opposition to AKP was able to secure more power, such as the Nationalist Action Party which succeeded in gaining representation in the Turkish Grand National Assembly. It describes the impact of the election of Abdullah Gül as president of the Turkish Republic on the AKP.

This essay examines the nature of the left-right dimension in the Turkish context. Using a nationwide representative survey conducted in 2006, the author estimates an ordered logit model to analyze the determinants of self-placements on a conventional one-to-ten left-right scale. The analysis reveals first that the scale does not reflect a fine-tuned grading along the ten-point scale but rather creates ordered categories of "left," "center," and "right." Given this constraint, the issue content persistently reflects the expected impacts of issues and demographic variables upon self-placements. Lastly, the author underlines the importance of religiosity and qualifies its impact upon ideological self-placements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The paper focuses on party preferences of Turkish voters within the spatial model of voting that proved to be a successful explanatory framework in various other countries. The analysis is based on spatial theory of electoral competition and its statistical implementation using survey data. The paper aims at depicting the cognitive organization of voters'' attitudes about issues and evaluations of political parties that compete for their vote. The spatial map derived from a survey of urban settlers show that the dominant ideological dimension sets secularists vs. pro-Islamists as expected from the center-periphery framework often used in Turkish electoral analyses. The second dimension reflects the impact of recent conflict involving the Kurdish minority on rising nationalist sentiments. Given a general depiction of the Turkish political space, we examine the impact of various demographic characteristics as well as issue evaluations on individuals'' ideal positions in the space. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This essay aims to develop an index of Alevi orientations for the Turkish electorate based on data collected in a post-November 2002 election survey during January–February 2003, conducted with a nationwide representative sample of voters. Series of validity checks yield encouraging results and show that Alevi versus Sunni/Hanefi piousness indicators and their attitudinal reflections are very much in contrast to one another. On the political scene, the secular versus pro-Islamist party divide is also linked to the observed Alevi–Sunni divide. The essay concludes by underlining the remaining challenges in measuring the sectarian differences in the context of Turkey and evaluating the implications of the empirical observations concerning the sectarian divide in Turkish politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduces a series of articles on Turkish studies.

The birth of CSES was the consequence of the shared belief that one cannot make sense of an election without examining the similarities and differences with other elections both within and across countries. Since the first CSES data collection in 1996, its public datasets have included 196 post-election surveys from 55 countries and provinces. This is perhaps the most widely used CSES question, which may reflect that comparative election researchers are not scared to address challenging normative questions of democratic performance. The CSES data are ideal for addressing such questions since they cover elections in many different countries and with many parties and party leaders. [Extracted from the article]

How do press-party parallelism dynamics unfold in media systems that experience competitive authoritarianism? We analyze the content of news coverage of political parties across four consecutive national election campaigns in Turkey (2002, 2007, 2011, and 2015) to track changes in press-party parallelism. We explore three dimensions of press-party parallelism in order to study its dynamics: visibility of political parties, the effective number of parties represented in newspapers, and lastly, favorability toward political parties. First, within each campaign cycle, as election day approaches, visibility of the incumbent party increases while the visibility of other parties tends to decline. Likewise, the incumbent party's visibility increases across the four elections we study. Second, for all newspaper groups, the number of parties that receive favorable or unfavorable coverage declines over consecutive election terms. Third, the incumbent party is the only that gains in terms of positive coverage within and across each election campaign period. Taken together, we show evidence for press-party parallelism dynamics in a competitive authoritarian country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the implications of citizens turning to online sources for news and information about politics? As the Internet and social media have become popular sources of news and information about politics, there has been a growing interest in understanding how this trend affects political knowledge. In this article, we analyze the effects of the Internet and social media use on the Turkish electorate's political knowledge drawing on an original, nationally representative survey fielded in 2015. We find that Internet use is positively associated with higher levels of political knowledge among the Turkish electorate, even after controlling for several relevant factors. At the same time, however, social media users are more likely to be misinformed and more likely to be opinionated about politics than non-users. Overall, the effects of the Internet on political knowledge seem to be multi-faceted and depend on which platforms people resort to getting their news. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]