Left-Right Reversed: Parties and Ideology in Modern Turkey

Abstract

Existing analysis of the Turkish party system suggests that it is unique in several respects. Upper class voters tend to support the Republican People’s Party (CHP), the center-left social democratic party, while poorer voters support the right. Unlike party systems in western democracies, expert surveys find that a religious-secular divide, and not a socio-economic divide, best explains the general left-right dimension. Qualitative literature stresses Turkey’s uniqueness due to the long history of the CHP, its close ties to the bureaucracy and military, and the role of the military in politics. Lastly, existing quantitative measures of policy positions disagree about the placement of major parties. We estimate the principle dimension of Turkish party competition using electoral manifestos as data by applying the Wordfish scaling algorithm. We find that ideology in Turkish politics is reversed, with the nominally center-left CHP employing more populist rhetoric typically associated with right wing parties in the West, and vice versa.