Economic and corruption voting in a predominant party system: The case of Turkey

Abstract

Voting behavior studies have paid scarce attention to the predominant party system (PPS), in which one party has won three consecutive legislative majorities, despite the fact that nearly half of the world democracies have had a PPS. It is often unclear why a large portion of voters prefer the same party over a long period of time. We propose two hypotheses to address the question. First, since PPSs often thrive when economic performance is strong, the long-term economic success of the incumbent party produces a “halo effect” that renders voters insensitive to short-term economic changes. Second, voters blame the incumbent party for the corruption of politicians only, and not for bureaucratic corruption. The current Turkish government initially established its wide electoral support on the basis of its economic performance, which gave rise to a PPS in 2011. However, the Turkish government has been tarnished in recent years by corruption allegations, especially since 2013. This paper applies a three-choice multinomial logit model to 2014 survey data to examine voter preference between the incumbent party, opposition parties, and neither in Turkey under its PPS. The results supported both hypotheses.