BACK TO THE YEAR WHEN IT ALL STARTED: LOCAL DETERMINANTS OF PARTY PREFERENCES IN 2002 TURKISH ELECTIONS
Journal Name:
- Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi Mimarlık Fakültesi Dergisi
Keywords (Original Language):
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Abstract (2. Language):
The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) won the 2007 general
elections in Turkey by a large margin and became the first party since the
1980s to increase its votes in two consecutive elections while in power (1).
Although the elections were held in a highly tense political climate arising
from controversy surrounding the presidential elections (Bacik, 2008), the
results came as no surprise to many and received far less attention in the
media, academia and public compared to the previous elections held in
2002. The exceptionally low turnout rate of 59.3%, as opposed to 84.3%
in 2002, is one of the obvious indications of low public interest in the
elections.
Looking backwards, many would agree now that it was the 2002 elections
that represented the major turn in Turkish politics. There are a number of
factors that make these elections unique. The first is certainly the victory
of a party described by many as “Islamist-leaning” (Kanra, 2005, 515) or
representing “moderate political Islam” (Çaha, 2003). The victory of AKP,
which had been established merely 15 months before the elections and
whose president had been in jail some time ago for publicly reciting a
poem, took almost everyone by surprise, even those who were accustomed
to the ups and downs of politics in Turkey. Described as a “political
earthquake” (Gruen, 2003) and even as a “tsunami” (Özel, 2003), the
impacts of the 2002 elections on society are indeed comparable to the year
1950 when the three-decade single-party rule came to an end or to the year
1980 when both the coup d’etat and liberal turn of the economy took place.
The ascent to power of a party whose origins were undeniably connected
with the politicization of Islam attracted worldwide attention and brought
to the fore some burning questions on the compatibility of Islam and
democracy in the post 9/11 world (2).
It was not only the victory of a party rooted in Islamist movement in a
country that had “a longer history of secularism than any other Muslim country” (Hermann, 2003, 266) that made these elections unique. All the
parties represented in the parliament, either in power or in opposition,
in the previous 1999 elections failed to pass the national threshold. All
the parties that took part in the governing three-party coalition, and the
opposition party, all representing the well-established traditions in Turkish
politics and all of which had been major actors of the political arena after
the 1980 military takeover, saw humiliating defeat and remained seatless
in the parliament. Contributing to the bizarreness of the election was the
unexpected 7.2% of votes received by the Young Party (GP), a new party
with no clear political identity (Bacik, 2004), led by a notorious business
tycoon, careful to dissociate himself from any established political tradition.
Furthermore, the pro-Kurdish People’s Democracy Party (DEH AP)
received an all-time high of 6.2% of votes.
Surprising though they certainly were as far as the established political
balances are concerned, the results of 2002 elections once again proved the
persistence of the well-known geographical pattern of voting in Turkey.
This pattern made itself visible, put very briefly, with concentrations
of liberal and social democrat parties in western regions, nationalist
parties in the centre, Islamist and conservative parties in the east and
pro-Kurdish party in the south east (3). The unevenness of spatial voting
patterns in Turkey has been well studied and documented in connection
with the 2002 and previous elections (Çarkoğlu, 2000; West, 2005). This
paper is structured around the objective of going beyond the mere task of
documenting the spatial unevenness of party votes and to unearth, with
the aid of geographically weighted regression (GWR) technique, the very
reasons that may account for why a particular political party received the
percentage of votes it did in a particular locality in the 2002 elections. In
other words, this is not an article about the geography of voting in Turkey,
but about the geography of factors that make political parties’ votes differ
from one region to another.
Using the district level results of the 2002 elections, we develop a model
that could explain the reasons behind this uneven spatial pattern of voting.
With this aim we build a two-stage regression model, one global and one
local. We start with an ordinary least squares (OLS) regression model to
unravel the nation-wide cause-effect relationships between party votes and
a number of social and economic indicators. In the next stage, we develop
a GWR model with the same variables in an attempt to take into account
the spatially changing (contingent) relationships between party votes and
independent variables. Allowing the parameters of a regression equation
to change locally, GWR depends on the understanding that the very same
cause may lead to a different effect in a different context. It is therefore
the contextual nature of interaction between a set of variables that GWR
tries to uncover. Formulated from another perspective, what we wish to
do in this paper is to show that there exist in Turkey, as far as party votes
are concerned, regions differentiated from each other not only in terms of
the percentage of votes received by each party, but also with regard to the
determinants of party preferences in each locality.
In the section that follows we discuss the 2002 elections and make brief
remarks about the political parties we enquire in the paper. The third
section is devoted to data considerations and building the OLS model. Here
we introduce the variables we use in the GWR model. The section that
follows comprises the GWR model and the implications that it brings to the
fore. In the final section of the paper, we discuss the conclusions flowing
out of the analysis we make.
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Abstract (Original Language):
İslami eğilimleri olan Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi’nin (AKP) 2002
seçimlerini kazanarak iktidara gelmesi ile birlikte Türkiye siyasetinde
çok önemli bir değişim yaşandı. Seçimler Türkiye siyasetini derinden
belirleyen “tsunami” etkisi yaratmış olsa da, Türkiye seçim coğrafyasında
ortaya çıkan farklılaşmaların ne denli kalıcı olduğunu bir kez daha gözler
önüne serdi. Coğrafi ağırlıklandırılmış regresyon olarak bilinen bir teknik
yardımıyla bu yazıda, Türkiye’deki eşitsiz seçim coğrafyasının ardında
yatan nedenler araştırılmaktadır. Elde edilen sonuçlar Türkiye siyaset
sahnesinin iki temel aktörü olan AKP ve CHP’nin oy düzeyini belirleyen
yerel etmenler açısından belirgin bir karşıtlık içinde olduklarını ortaya
koymaktadır. AKP’nin, geleneksel sağ partilerin tersine, kent yoksulları ile
Anadolu’nun hızla gelişen bölgelerinde kendine bir taban bulmuş olmasına
karşın, sosyal demokrat CHP büyük ölçüde kentli seçkin kesimlerle kısıtlı
kalmış görünmektedir. Bu bulgu, çoğu araştırmacı tarafından Türkiye
siyasetinin en belirgin özelliklerinden biri olarak görülen “merkez-çevre”
ayrımının yeni bir görüntüsü olarak ele alınmalıdır.
FULL TEXT (PDF):
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