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Economic Adversity and Voter Turnout: Evidence from Turkish Parliamentary Elections

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Abstract

This paper investigates the relationship between economic adversity and voter participation in Turkish parliamentary elections. We employ a dynamic model of voter turnout using a cross-regional panel dataset covering all parliamentary elections for the 1987–2018 period. In addition to lagged voter turnout to account for persistency in electoral participation, our models include two measures of economic adversity: inflation, and economic growth. Empirical results indicate that inflation has a positive and significant effect on voter turnout, while economic growth is insignificant in all specifications. Moreover, inflation is associated with higher voter turnout in provinces with a denser population, higher urbanization, and more abundant human capital. Regional voter turnout rates tend to persistently support the habit formation argument. Overall, our empirical results are consistent with the mobilization hypothesis, suggesting that adverse economic conditions lead to higher electoral participation by stimulating voters to punish the government.

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Notes

  1. Especially after the 1980s, Turkey has experienced a relatively high turnout rate with a national average of 86.6% in parliamentary elections. It is interesting to note that this is similar to the case of post-communist countries, where the turnout rates were quite high in the first open competitive elections (Pacek et al., 2009).

  2. See Geys (2006), Cancela and Geys (2016), and Stockemer (2017a, 2017b) for extensive reviews.

  3. We note that, technically, the 1946 elections were the first multi-party parliamentary elections in the Republican era. However, as mentioned by Kalaycıoğlu and Çarkoğlu (2007, p.14), the 1946 elections can be regarded as a “transition election” since there were several irregularities and deficient voting practices leading to unfair elections. Sayari (2002, p.10) also mentions that the regime change was not sudden but spread over the period 1946–1950. Thus, following the common practice in related works, we take the 1950 elections as the first one in this study (also see Esmer (2002, p.1)).

  4. See Appendix A for the NUTS classification of Turkish regions.

  5. See Stockemer (2017a, 2017b) for a different method of measuring voter turnout.

  6. We cannot use the unemployment rate to measure economic fluctuations due to a lack of provincial-level data. Having said this, we believe that inflation is a much better indicator of economic adversity than the unemployment rate for several reasons. First of all, Turkey has had a chronic inflation problem since the late 1970s. The average inflation rate in the sample period, 1987–2018, was 39.2%. In this period, inflation remained in the single digits for only 12 years. In contrast, the average unemployment rate is only 8.95%. Second, the inflation volatility is much greater than the volatility in the unemployment rate. Inflation has fluctuated between 6.2% and 105%, while unemployment rate has fluctuated between 6.5% and 12.5%. In fact, the coefficient of variation of inflation and unemployment rates are 82% and 17%, respectively. Hence, Turkey has struggled with both inflation and inflation uncertainty in the last four decades. Finally, there is a dramatic variation between regional inflation rates in Turkey. The coefficient of variation of inflation varies between 82 and 118% in the sample period.

  7. One might argue that the change from a parliamentary to a presidential system might cause a structural break and influence the estimation results. However, estimation results are robust, excluding the 2018 elections, and results are available upon request.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, Yildiz Technical University, Davutpasa Campus, Esenler, 34220, Istanbul, Turkey

    Özge Kama, Tolga Aksoy & Hüseyin Taştan

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  1. Özge Kama
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  2. Tolga Aksoy
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  3. Hüseyin Taştan
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Correspondence to Özge Kama.

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An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2021 Meeting of the European Public Choice Society, held in Lille, France, April 21—22 2021. The authors are grateful to conference participants and anonymous referees of this journal for their helpful comments. Any remaining errors are our own.

Appendix

Appendix

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Table 7 NUTS Regions in Turkey
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7,

Table 8 Voter Turnout Summary Statistics across Turkish Provinces: 1983–2018
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8 and

Table 9 Correlation Table
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9.

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Kama, Ö., Aksoy, T. & Taştan, H. Economic Adversity and Voter Turnout: Evidence from Turkish Parliamentary Elections. Soc Indic Res 163, 799–821 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-022-02919-4

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