Beliefs, economics, and spatial regimes in voting behavior: the Turkish case, 2007–2018

Abstract

Abstract The Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) came to power in 2002, and since then has never received <34% of nationwide voter support in Turkish general elections. Recent research focuses on the Economic Voting Theorem (EVT), specifically the varieties of pocketbook or sociotropic voting, as the primary explanation for the AKP’s successive electoral victories. However, this approach fails to adequately explain the ongoing electoral support for the AKP at both national and local levels, even under poor economic performance. It also fails to consider the impact of the spatial components of peripheral sociologies. This study employs the comparative method with EVT and Center–Periphery (C–P) phenomena in order to understand the dominant characteristics of voting behavior from a spatial perspective. Although EVT and C–P explanations take part in the literature, a limited number of studies measure and visualize the impact of those from a spatial perspective. In order to distinguish between the effects of EVT and C–P the study utilizes an original data set that measures different socio-economic factors such as per capita growth, unemployment, inflation, education, age, religious conservatism, ethnicity, and space both at the national and local levels. The results, contrary to expectations, show that the main drivers of voting behavior for the AKP consist of a mix of both C–P and EVT while C–P factors have a greater impact. In comparison to the EVT, C–P features such as religious conservatism and ethnicity perform better as predictors of the AKP’s electoral performance than the national and local economic conditions. Also, spatial results imply that support for the AKP has different spatial regimes based on ethnic identity and there are no spatial spillovers between spatial regimes in terms of voting behavior.