Party identification and vote choice in Turkey

Abstract

The Turkish party system, and with it party identification of the individual voter, have been almost systematically undermined every 10 years or so between 1950 and 2002 by three military coups and changes in electoral behavior they had precipitated. In a paper published in 2007 it was demonstrated that political socialization did matter to produce and replicate the parental party identification over the years in Turkey (Kalaycıoğlu 2008). Political socialization seemed to have emerged as a major determinant of partisan affiliation to the relatively older Republican People's Party (CHP) and Nationalist Action Parties (MHP), while the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) identifiers had taken few cues from their parents and paid more attention to the economic performance of the AKP in government instead. Ideology seems to play a major role in determining the psychological orientations of those who feel attached to the CHP versus the AKP or the MHP, but little role in differentiating AKP from MHP voters. Ethnicity only plays a role in partisan affiliation to the MHP, a strong Turkish nationalist party. Almost a decade after the original study of party identification this paper revisits the role of party identification in the determination of the vote for the main political parties of the system in Turkey. Now that the Turkish party system has a brand new IYI Party and a recently competing Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), it is plausible to expect that party identification would have solidified more for the AKP and less critical for the IYI and HDP, and continued on being critical for the CHP and MHP. Using the 2018 elections data of the Turkish Elections Study (TES), I will examine empirically the role played by ideology, economic evaluations, and party identification in the role that they play in the determination of party preferences in the 2018 elections.