Abstract
Turkey can be considered as a text-book example of a unitary and centralized state. Yet, an analysis of provincial elections provides interesting insights into the territorialization of the vote. The ethnic Turkish/Kurdish divide has produced, particularly in the last decade, a strong territorialization of the vote in provinces densely populated by ethnic Kurds. At the same time, the analysis confirms that provincial elections can be understood as ‘barometer elections’. Differently from classic ‘second-order elections’, provincial elections neither systematically show a lower level of turnout nor systematically reward new/opposition parties vis-à-vis government parties. Rather, they appear to show how people would vote in a national election. Provincial elections tend, therefore, to follow trends emerged in the previous national election and/or to anticipate trends that will manifest themselves in the following national election.
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- 1.
Regions in Turkey are defined on the basis of geography, economic conditions and public service requirements (1982 Constitution, Art. 126) and were actually established within the European nomenclature framework of territorial units for statistics (NUTS) with law no. 4706/2002. The NUTS regions do have corresponding development agencies that were established in response to EU accession criteria but do not have corresponding political/administrative governance structures (see Loewendahl-Ertugal 2005). There are 12 NUTS1 regions (Istanbul, West Marmara, Aegean, East Marmara, Mediterranean, West Anatolia, Central Anatolia, West Black Sea, East Black Sea, North-Eastern Anatolia, Central-Eastern Anatolia and South-Eastern Anatolia) and 26 NUTS2 sub-regions. Only, in the case of Istanbul NUTS1, NUTS2 and the provincial unit coincide. While in the cases of Ankara and Izmir, there is a coincidence between the respective NUTS2 and the provincial units.
- 2.
Presidential elections in Turkey were introduced very recently within a formally parliamentary constitutional framework. The first presidential election was held in 2014.
- 3.
The Ottoman Empire undertook a reform of the provincial administration―from ‘eyalet’ to ‘vilayet’―with the 1864 Province Regulation (1864 Vilayet Nizamnamesi), which was highly influenced by the centralistic French model (Keleş 2009, p. 138). In geographical terms, the provinces established during the republican period are comparable with the counties (livalar/sanjaks)―that is, the second layer of local administration―defined by the 1864 regulation. The counties were mostly named after the city and town centers around which they were established.
- 4.
The data on population of province/district centers and towns/villages is retrieved from the website of Turkish Statistical Institute: http://tuik.gov.tr/
- 5.
Although there is no minimum threshold for the population of a province, only provinces with a population exceeding 750,000 people can be converted into a greater city municipality (Metropolitan Municipality Law No. 5216/2004).
- 6.
The first metropolitan municipalities (Büyükşehir Belediyeleri) were established in 1984 with Law no. 3030.
- 7.
The size and population of provinces varies significantly across Turkey. Turkey’s 81 provinces are divided into 984 districts. Bayburt, the smallest of the provinces with three districts, has a population of around 78,000. Its provincial council is composed of only eight members. Afyonkarahisar, the biggest of the 51 provinces with a provincial administration, has a population of 700,000, 18 districts and a provincial council composed of 50 members. The average number of seats for the 51 provinces that currently have provincial councils is 24.5 members based on the 2014 provincial council elections, excluding the greater cities where the provincial administrations are abolished. Turkey’s biggest city, İstanbul, which has a population of around 14 million and is divided into 39 districts, used to have 277 provincial council members before the provincial administration was abolished with the 2012 reform. The average number of seats for the provincial councils was 40.5 members based on the results of 2009 provincial council elections. Istanbul’s greater city municipality council is currently composed of 310 members.
- 8.
Because of the absorption of 30 provincial councils by greater municipalities’ councils, data referring to the 2014 provincial elections are a mix of ‘real’ provincial council elections (in 51 provinces) and greater municipalities’ council elections (where these replaced the provincial councils). The electoral systems for the election of provincial councils and greater municipalities councils are extremely similar, both based on proportional representation.
- 9.
The pro-Kurdish party changed its name several times, due to bans and restyling. The original name was People’s Democracy Party (HADEP), then changed into Democratic People’s Party (DEHAP), then again into Democratic Society Party (DTP), and finally into Peace and Democracy Party (BDP). Lately, in an attempt to reach leftist voters beyond the ethnic (Kurdish) electorate, the party has also created a new label Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) with which it participates in elections outside the Kurdish populated provinces in Eastern and South-Eastern Turkey. We use the label BDP-HDP for the whole period 1995–2014.
- 10.
In the national election held on 7 June 2015, the pro-Kurdish party has managed to increase its votes and seats reverting again its strategy, that is, successfully competing as a party.
- 11.
It is important to note that the share of ethnic Kurds varies substantively also within this subset of provinces. In some of them, such as Kars and Şanlıurfa, which are populated also by other ethnic minority groups (Caucasian and Arabic respectively), the Kurdish majority is just an informed assumption; whereas other provinces, such as Hakkari and Şırnak, are commonly considered as populated almost exclusively by ethnic Kurds.
- 12.
The 1983 election was held under the tutelage of the military regime that imposed major restrictions on which parties and politicians could participate. In crude terms, besides two parties imposed by the military establishment, the only party emanating from the civil society was the center-right Motherland Party (Anavatan Partisi, ANAP), a successor of the outlawed Justice Party (Adalet Partisi, AP). However, by the time of the subsequent provincial elections, in 1984, some of the restrictions had been lifted, allowing a wider and more freely formed electoral offer, which attracted more than two thirds of the votes that in 1983 had gone to the two parties of the military establishment. That is why the election and party system incongruence indexes (NR-RR and NN-RR)—which are computed comparing the 1984 provincial elections results with those of the 1983 national election results—reached those exceptional values in 1983. Conversely, the restricted electoral offer of the 1983 election produced the lowest level of electorate incongruence (NN-NR) across provinces (see Fig. 11.1).
- 13.
In the June 2015 national elections (not included in this study), the decline of the AKP in Kurdish majority provinces, as well as in Kurdish neighborhoods within Western Turkey’s cities, appears to have sharply accelerated.
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Massetti, E., Aksit, S. (2017). Turkey: Provincial Elections as a Barometer of National Politics. In: Schakel, A. (eds) Regional and National Elections in Eastern Europe. Comparative Territorial Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51787-6_11
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