Turkey's Electoral Geography Trends, Behaviors, and Identities Routledge Studies in Middle Eastern Politics Series

Analyzing Turkey?s electoral geography, this volume evaluates the geographical repercussions of the elections in Turkey since the establishment of multiparty politics in 1950. The book focuses on the last two decades, examining the interaction between electoral behavior and regional dynamics.

Various issues related to the geographical connotations of Turkish electoral politics are qualitatively and quantitatively addressed by scholars with diverse backgrounds in social sciences. The chapters herein examine how Turkey?s electoral geography has been shaped over the years to correspond with a certain aspect of multiparty politics, such as voting behaviors, political parties and party systems, nationalization and regionalization, redistricting, gender issues, identity dynamics, or ideological polarization. This comprehensive work contributes to the theoretical debates in electoral geography in general. Utilizing notions from electoral geography literature, this book develops new concepts through the Turkish case.

Filling an important gap in the literature on Turkish politics, this contemporary analysis will be a key resource to policymakers, students, and scholars interested in political science, Turkey, and the Middle East.

Contents

List of figures

List of tables

Notes on contributors

Acknowledgments

1. Introduction to Turkey’s electoral geography: an overview since 1950

Edip Asaf Bekaroğlu and Gülsen Kaya Osmanbaşoğlu

2. Measuring party nationalization in Turkey: 1950–2018

Özhan Demirkol and& Edip Asaf Bekaroğlu

3. Gerrymandering in Turkish elections since 1950: (re)setting the rules of the game?

Gülsen Kaya Osmanbaşoğlu

4. The dynamics of change and differentiation in voter preferences in the western coastal provinces of Turkey since the 1980s

Tanju Tosun, Betül Aydoğan Ünal, and Gülgün Erdoğan Tosun

5. The regional and national campaign discourse of the PDP and its predecessors in Turkey’s general elections, 2002–2018

Hüseyin Alptekin

6. ‘"Where are they doing politics?"’: women’s cooperatives as sites of constellations of power

Selin Akyüz and Kürşat Çınar

7. Election monitoring organizations in view of electoral geography: regional characteristics of volunteer networks in Turkey

Ayşenur Kılıç

8. Engendering the parliament: a study of women deputies in Turkey, 1935–2018

Mezher Yüksel

9. An analysis of Turkish overseas electoral districts: opportunities and challenges

Necati Anaz and Mehmet Köse

Edip Asaf Bekaroğlu earned his PhD in political science at Bilkent University, Turkey in 2010. Since then, he has worked as a full time faculty member at İstanbul University’s Department of Political Science and International Relations. His research interests are democratization, political parties and elections, secularism, and multiculturalism.

Gülsen Kaya Osmanbaşoğlu earned her PhD in political science at Bilkent University in 2014. She is a faculty member at the Social Sciences University of Ankara, Department of Political Science and Public Administration, and the deputy director of Social Innovation Center (ASBU11 SIM). Her research interests are Turkish politics, political parties and elections, modernization, human rights, and social innovation.