Turkey: Provincial Elections as a Barometer of National Politics

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.