Guest editors' note.

• Author: Kose, Talha
• Position: Editorial

2015 was the year of elections in Turkey with two parliamentary elections and months-long election campaigns that dominated the political agenda of the country. The parliamentary elections of June 7 brought an end to the AK Party's 12-year long era of parliamentary majority and single-party government in Turkey. Nevertheless, the endeavors to form a coalition government could not be concluded successfully and another election appeared on the horizon. The country was ruled by an AK Party-led interim government and the elections were repeated five months later on November 1. While close in time, the two elections were quite distant with regard to the political contexts in which they were carried out, and in their respective results. The November elections witnessed a comeback for the AK Party, which increased its votes by over 9 points with the addition of five million new votes in the ballot box.

Voter turnout rates were very high in both elections. The HDP's efforts to surpass the ten percent national threshold and transform itself from being a regional party into a political party with a broader national agenda was an important dynamic of the June 7 elections. The HDP was indeed successful in overcoming the ten percent threshold in the June elections. The collapse of the Cozum Sureci (Kurdish Peace Process) in July strained Turkey's political environment as the various potential coalition partners struggled to come to agreement. The main puzzle for the November 1 elections was whether the AK Party would be able to regain its position to form a single-party government, and in fact it did succeed in winning the majority of the seats in the Turkish parliament by a wide margin in the November elections. The HDP and the MHP were thus the main losers of the November elections.

This issue of Insight Turkey is prepared in order to understand the elections of 2015 on a comparative basis. For this purpose, this issue, first, includes some articles that elaborate on these two elections comparatively from a general point of view encompassing all the related parties and important issues by integrating them into a single analytical framework. The issue also includes articles that examine the two elections of 2015 along a number of dimensions, from identity to the economic dimension, and from an analysis of diaspora votes to econometric and disaggregate analyses of the elections. Finally, the issue at hand also includes articles and commentaries that...