Voter Profiles and Fragmentation in the Turkish Party System

Abstract

Based on the multinomial logit estimates of an individual vote intention function, we perform restriction tests to make pairwise comparisons of the voter profiles of the major political parties in Turkey. The economic variables in the model are items that represent the well known hypotheses of economic voting theory, i.e. whether individuals vote retrospectively and/or prospectively, and whether they are sociotropic and/or pocketbook. The non-economic factors include socio-demographic characteristics as well as issues and identity variables that are likely to be good predictors of the party choice. In many cases, restriction tests provide evidence refuting the general view that the Turkish party system is artificially fragmented.