Economic voting in the 2023 Turkish general election

ABSTRACT

The Turkish economy presented a complicated picture ahead of the 2023 election, with significant currency depreciation and soaring inflation yet robust growth and stable employment levels. How did voters’ economic perceptions shape election results in such a context? Drawing on Turkish Election Study surveys, this study reaches two main conclusions. First, while the average evaluation of the economy in the electorate was quite poor, there is a sharp divergence across incumbent supporters and others: The incumbent Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi – AKP) supporters’ evaluations have changed little since the previous election in 2018, yet those of other voters have deteriorated significantly. Second, the opposition seems to have failed in convincing large parts of the electorate that they would manage the economy better than Erdoğan. Overall, economic voting appears to have worked as expected, and the unwavering economic evaluations of likely AKP voters and the perceived incompetence of the opposition seem to have helped Erdoğan to win another term.

KEYWORDS:

• Economic voting
• elections
• Turkey

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/14683857.2024.2324524.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. This statement is just a simplification of the vast literature on economic voting. Thorough reviews of the economic voting literature could be found in Healy and Malhotra (2013), Kayser (2014), and Lewis-Beck and Stegmaier (2013).

2. https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/turkey/overview#3

3. https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/turkey/overview#3

4. We should note that two massive earthquakes have struck Turkey in February 2023, leading to major devastation in 11 provinces. The government estimated the total damage of these earthquakes to the economy to be around 104 billion USD, amounting to 9% of the (projected) GDP in 2023. See https://www.sbb.gov.tr/2023-kahramanmaras-ve-hatay-depremleri-raporu/

5. Until 2022, there was just a single annual adjustment to the minimum wage implemented in January. Beginning in 2022, however, there are two adjustments made – one in January and the other one in July. In January 2022, there was a 51% increase in the minimum wage followed by another 29% in July 2022. In January 2023, there was a 55% increase in the minimum wage followed by another 34% in July 2023.

6. See https://data.tuik.gov.tr/Bulten/Index?p=Kazanc-Yapisi-Istatistikleri-2022–49750 for 2022 and https://data.tuik.gov.tr/Bulten/Index?p=kazanc-yapisi-arastirmasi-2018–30580&dil=1 for 2018.

7. https://tr.euronews.com/2023/07/06/akademisyen-maaslari-aclik-siniri-ve-asgari-ucrete-gore-nasil-degist

8. The November 1, 2015 general election, which was held due to the hung parliament following the June election, is excluded from the analyses for two reasons. First, there was a very short campaign period for parties, given that this snap election was announced in late August. Second, the period leading up to the November election was also characterized by a significant increase in terror attacks that dominated the political agenda of the country (Aytaç and Çarkoğlu 2021).

9. The sampling procedure for the surveys starts with the use of Turkish Statistical Institute’s NUTS- 2 regions. The target samples were distributed according to each region’s share of urban and rural population in accordance with current records of the Address Based Population Registration System (ADNKS). Next, TUIK’s block data were used with block size set at four hundred residents. Twenty voters were targeted from each block and no substitution was used. The selection of individuals in households is done based on reported target population of eighteen years or older in each household according to a lottery method. If for any reason that individual cannot respond to our questions on our first visit, then the same household is visited up to three times until a successful interview is conducted and no substitution was applied. All interviews are conducted face to face in respondents’ households.

10. The question wording in the 2007 survey was substantially different from later surveys, and therefore is excluded from analyses.

11. An interesting pattern in this regard from Turkey is the economic evaluations of the voters of the Nationalist Action Party (Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi - MHP). After long being in opposition, MHP closed ranks with the incumbent AKP after 2015 general election and entered into a formal electoral alliance with it ahead of the 2018 general election. This switch in status from opposition to incumbency was accompanied by a sharp improvement in MHP voters’ economic evaluations. In the 2015 pre-election TES survey, the mean sociotropic retrospective evaluation of MHP voters was below the sample average (3.3 vs. 4.3), yet in the 2018 pre-election survey this relationship was reversed: The MHP voters’ evaluation of the economy was now better than the sample average (5.4 vs. 4.7). This same pattern holds in the 2023 survey as well, with MHP voters having a better evaluation of the economy than the overall sample.

12. If we focus on political independents only, that is, those respondents who report not feeling close to any political party, we see that the views about the prospective performance of Kılıçdaroğlu were slightly better than those about Erdoğan: About 26% of independents thought that the economy would get worse if Kılıçdaroğlu wins the election (vis-à-vis 38% if Erdoğan wins), and about 23% thought that the economy would get better (vis-à-vis 15% if Erdoğan wins). Nevertheless, political independents constitute about 22% of the sample, so the edge of Kılıçdaroğlu over Erdoğan in this respect amounts to only about 2% of the electorate.

13. Past research on voting behaviour in Turkey consistently show that lower levels of education are positively correlated with voting for the AKP while individuals with higher levels of education are more likely to vote for the CHP. See, among others (Aytaç 2022; Aytaç and Çarkoğlu 2021; Başlevent et al. 2009; Çarkoğlu 2012).,

14. Aytaç (2022) focused on legislative elections and considered vote for the AKP as the dependent variable.

15. As Erdoğan was the candidate of the Cumhur Alliance (led by the AKP and MHP), model (2) in Table 3 might include a control for MHP partisans as well. The inclusion of this variable to the model does not result in any meaningful change, however, and I prefer to exclude it from the specification to facilitate comparisons of results with models having Vote_AKP as the dependent variable (models 3 and 4).

16. See, e.g., Pitel (2021), Spicer (2023), Zeyrek (2023).

17. Erdoğan won the presidential election in 2018 in the first round with 52.6% of votes. In comparison, he received 49.5% of votes in the first round of the 2023 presidential election and won the run-off with 52.2% of votes. The AKP, on the other hand, saw a decline in its vote share from 42.6% in 2018 to 35.6% in 2023.

18. Of course, it would be difficult to argue that the economy was the only factor shaping election results. Erdoğan and the AKP have tried to make security concerns a salient issue in the election, which has been shown to be electorally beneficial for them (Aytaç 2021b). Still, the survey result shows that an overwhelming majority of voters considered the economy as the most salient issue ahead of the 2023 election. In addition, the candidate choice of the opposition for presidency and distributive politics in the Turkish context (e.g., Aytaç 2014; Çarkoğlu and Aytaç 2015) might have a played a role in election results as well, however, there are no systematic studies conducted in these directions as of yet.

Additional information

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Selim Erdem Aytaç

Selim Erdem Aytaç is Associate Professor at the Department of International Relations at Koç University in Istanbul. He received his Ph.D. in political science from Yale University in 2014. His research interests lie in political behavior with a focus on electoral accountability and political participation. Dr. Aytaç’s work has been published in the American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, and Comparative Political Studies, among others.