Social Indicators and Voting: the Turkish Case

Abstract

The aim of this article is to set out the various explanations of voting behaviour in Turkey. Its principal intellectual motivation is to present the political and social indicators that shape voting in such a way as to explain how an activity which is so crucial for democratic life is also based upon voters' values and surrounding political context. Although the number of empirical work on voting behaviour in Turkey is increasing there is a considerable room for testing alternative variables and research tools in order to expand the academic knowledge on the problematic. Findings ratified that the political and personal values coupled with the other social factors have considerable impact on the voting behaviour in Turkey. Additionally this research also proved that these factors work differently for the competing political parties. Hence the contribution of this study is the introduction of an explicit analysis on the impact of different social and political factors that are salient in voting behaviour and magnitudes of these factors on different political parties by using a public database. Thus this study will not only uncover the relevancy of the variables in the literature for Turkish voters but also it will highlight the meaning and significance of these factors for different political parties.