Economic voting during the AKP era in Turkey

Abstract

Economic voting, that is voters’ rewarding or punishing the incumbent according to the state of the economy, is one of the main approaches to voting behavior. This chapter explores economic voting during the Justice and Development Party (AKP) era in Turkey. Drawing on data from five nationally representative surveys fielded between 2007 and 2019, it finds that voters’ evaluations of the economy are a significant predictor of voting for the AKP. Even after accounting for several socio-demographic factors, ideological self-positioning, and partisanship, individuals with more positive economic evaluations are more likely to vote for the AKP. These findings hint at the presence of electoral accountability through economic voting in the Turkish context. At the same time, however, there is a significant and growing divergence in economic evaluations across partisanship—evaluations of AKP partisans are consistently more positive than those of other voters, and the magnitude of this gap in evaluations has been increasing since 2007. Given this increasing influence of partisanship on perceptions of the economy, voters’ subjective economic evaluations may not correspond to objective economic conditions. As the gap between subjective evaluations and objective conditions widens, we can expect weakened electoral accountability for actual economic outcomes.