Putting Turkey's June and November 2015 election outcomes in perspective.

• Author: Akarca, Ali T.

Introduction

The vote share of a party over time can be viewed as having a level around which it generally fluctuates. Long run factors, such as the cultural, socio-economic, and demographic characteristics of voters and the history and geography of the country determine the level. However, military coups, political bans, and the institutional changes they bring can have long lasting effects on the level of vote share as well. Short run factors, such as an electorate's desire to check and balance the power of the ruling party, to express their pleasure or displeasure with its decisions and promises, and to reward or punish it for its economic performance, cause temporary deviations from the level. When the impacts of temporary and persistent shocks overlap, as was the case in Turkey during the 13-year tenure of the Justice and Development Party (AK Party), it becomes difficult to interpret election outcomes properly. That is why the party's performance in almost every election was considered surprising at least to some extent and many firsts were realized in each.

The AK Party came to power in 2002, only a year after it was established, and has ruled Turkey ever since in single-party governments, longer than any other party since the first fairly contested election took place in 1950. In 2004, it became the second party since 1963 to raise its vote share in a local administrations election relative to the previous parliamentary election. (1) Then in 2007, by raising its vote share after ruling for a full legislative term, the party matched the record established by the Democrat Party (DP) in 1954. Its vote share declined in the 2009 local administrations election, but in the 2011 parliamentary election, it broke one and matched another DP record. The AK Party became the first party to be elected to a third consecutive term since 1957, and the first party ever to continue raising its vote share after remaining in power for two consecutive terms. In the same election, it also became the first party to reach a fifty percent vote share since 1965, when the Justice Party (AP) did it, and the second party since 1950 and 1954 when the DP did it. Furthermore, in 2011 the AK Party became the first incumbent party to recover from a nosedive since the AP did in 1975. Then in the November 2015 snap parliamentary election, by bouncing back to its 2011 peak after experiencing declines in the 2014 local administrations and June 2015 parliamentary elections, the AK Party became the first incumbent party to accomplish the latter feat twice. This also marked the beginning of the party's unprecedented fourth term. (2)

The fact that the above events have occurred only once in about half a century, and were spread over several elections, indicates that they cannot be explained by routine factors alone or by factors specific only to one election. Furthermore, their concentration in about a decade of time now, and when they first occurred, suggests the existence of similar equilibriums, which will be the subject matter of the next section. On the other hand, the fact that the vote shares of the incumbent parties fluctuated points to the existence of short-run factors, which cause temporary deviations from such equilibriums. These will be discussed in section three, in light of the economic voting literature developed over the last half a century or so. Lewis-Beck and Paldam (3) define economic voting as "a field that mixes economics and political science and does so by means of econometrics." It considers the credit or blame the government gets due to economic conditions, the advantages and disadvantages of incumbency, political inertia, and strategic voting by the electorate to balance the power of the government and to avoid wasting their vote on a party that is not likely to get representation in the parliament. Lewis-Beck and Paldam, Lewis-Beck and Stegmaier, and Stegmaier and Lewis-Beck provide detailed surveys of this literature. (4) Akarca and Tansel show that Turkish voters behave in ways that are very similar to the patterns described in the economic voting literature. (5)

In some elections, factors specific to those contests can make the effects mentioned above larger or smaller than typical. That this was the case with the June 7 and November 1 elections will be explained in section four. When an event is unique, we cannot estimate the magnitude of its effect from past data, even though we may be able to guess its direction. For such instances, Box and Tiao propose a procedure which has become part of a broader methodology named intervention analysis. (6) To measure the impact of an extraordinary event (or events) on a particular variable, they recommend comparing the prediction obtained for that variable from a model, which captures patterns prevailing until that event, with actuality. Following their approach, we will build a vote equation to capture the effects of routine factors mentioned in section 3 on Turkish election outcomes. This model, which will be presented in the Appendix, is an updated and revised version of a vote equation developed by Akarca and Tansel and later used by Akarca to predict outcomes of various Turkish elections. (7) In section 4, outcomes of the June 7 and November 1 elections will be compared to their respective forecasts obtained from that equation. Any differences observed will be taken as measures of the impacts of special circumstances prevailing prior to these elections.

Understanding the forces that have determined election outcomes in Turkey in general, and the outcomes of the last two elections in particular, will let us understand why the AK Party vote share dipped in June 2015, only to return to its 2011 peak in just five months, and will also allow us to assess whether and to what extent this was unusual. Finally, in the last section, the conclusions reached will be summarized.

Long-run Determinants of Election Outcomes

Most voters align themselves with a party that they identify as representing their economic interests and ideology. The demographic, cultural, and socio-economic characteristics of voters, their habits, geographical location, ethnicity, and religious sect determine their interests and worldview. Since these factors change very gradually or not at all, holding other factors constant, voters tend to choose the same party they voted for in the previous election. This creates a great amount of inertia in the political system and determines the level of support for a party in the long run. Thus, in predicting a party's vote share, it makes sense to take its share in the previous election as the starting point. That is why many researchers, such as Martins and Veiga, Akarca, Akarca and Tansel, Fair, Chappell and Veiga, Whitten and Palmer, Alesina and Rosenthal, and Erikson include a lagged vote share variable in their vote equations. (8)

Until 1995, the Turkish electorate tended to gather in three camps: right-conservative, left-statist, and Turkish-nationalist parties. At present, the AK Party, the Republican People's Party (CHP) and the Nationalist Action Party (MHP) represent these groups. (9) Since 1995, a Kurdish-nationalist party was added to the three. Under normal conditions, the largest of these, the right-conservative movement, gets the support of about half of the Turkish electorate. However, due to interruptions from outside the political system, such as military coups and threats of coups, and party closures by the judiciary, this movement was frequently fragmented. Each time that happened, it pulled itself back together, but each time this required a longer time due to extra handicaps placed in its way. The DP surpassed the 50 percent vote share in 1950 and 1954 and came very close to doing so again in 1957. After it was toppled by the military on 27 May 1960, with its leader executed, members of parliament imprisoned and the party banned, the party's votes split in the 1961 election. However, in the Senate election held in 1964 and in the parliamentary general election held in 1965, the vote share of the AP, the party that emerged as the successor to the DP, exceeded 50 percent. The party's vote share was only a little less than 50 percent in 1969 but following the military intervention of 12 March 1971, the right wing vote was split once again. This time it took until the 1979 Senate election for the AP to come close to a 50 percent vote share. Then, another military coup on 12 September 1980 fragmented the conservative vote even more. Because the major left party was closed too in the latter episode, that wing was divided as well. Although the right-wing Motherland Party (ANAP) received 45 percent of the vote in 1983, after the ban on other parties and political leaders was lifted in 1987, the fragmentation which resulted was even greater than the ones experienced before. Interventions by the military in 28 February 1997 and 27 April 2007, which fell short of a takeover and were dubbed a postmodern coup and e-coup by the media, prolonged the fragmentation. It took until 2011 for right-conservative voters to gather around a single party. In short, although from a short-run perspective the AK Party may appear as an anomaly, it is really a reincarnation of the broad coalition represented by the DP in the 1950s and the AP in the second half of the 1960s and the end of the 1970s. However, the realignment which began immediately and took three and six years respectively, after the 1960 and 1971 coups, was delayed for almost two decades and took nine years to complete after the 1980 coup. For example, just as the AK Party did in 2002, the AP received slightly less than 35 percent of the votes in 1961, in the first election it entered. However, unlike the AK Party, the AP was able to reach 50 percent in 1964 Senate elections and exceed 50 percent in the next parliamentary general election held in 1965. For the AK Party, it took not the next...