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Abstract
A key issue on the Turkish political agenda concerns a transition to presidentialism, with a constitutional amendment proposal submitted in December 2016. While the positions of political elites are well known, we lack a detailed analysis of the electorate’s views on such a transition. To fill this gap, we present cross-sectional and panel data collected over the period from spring 2015 to winter 2015–16. Partisanship emerges as the key factor shaping views on presidentialism, and reflections of the centre–periphery cleavage in Turkish politics are also visible. The shift of the Turkish nationalist constituency’s views in favour of presidentialism has been a significant trend in the aftermath of the June 2015 general election.
Notes
* This article was originally published with error. This version has been corrected. Please see Corrigendum (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13608746.2017.1291293).
1. Changes to the Constitution require the support of at least 330 MPs in parliament to be put to a popular referendum, and the AKP group in parliament needs the votes of at least 15 MHP MPs. The MHP leadership declared that they would support the proposal.
2. See Hürriyet Daily News (Citation2016) for the details of the proposal.
3. To get around the ten per cent national threshold requirement, candidates from HDP ran as independents in previous elections.
4. The negotiations between AKP and MHP which culminated in the aforementioned constitutional amendment proposal were initiated by the MHP leader, Devlet Bahçeli. At this point it is not clear why Bahçeli dropped his strong opposition to presidentialism and decided to enter negotiations with AKP, but we offer some thoughts on this in the concluding section.
5. See Aytaç and Çarkoğlu (Citation2015) for an analysis of the Turkish public’s support for presidentialism ahead of the June 2015 election.
6. Ergüder (Citation2015) reminds us that former Presidents Demirel and Özal made appeals for presidentialism in the 1990s.
7. Both CHP and HDP filed complaints to the Constitutional Court in this regard ahead of the June 2015 election (Hürriyet Daily News Citation2015). Similar criticisms were voiced by the leader of MHP as well (Erdem Citation2015).
8. For a comprehensive overview of the presidentialism vs. parliamentarism debate in Turkey, see the essays in Akaş (Citation2015).
9. See Kalaycıoğlu (Citation2008) for a similar argument on partisanship in the Turkish context.
10. Nonresponses and undecided respondents are coded as 0. This coding decision does not have any impact on our results, yet discarding nonresponses would correspond to a decrease of about 9–14 per cent in the number of observations across different surveys.
11. As Kalaycıoğlu (Citation2008) notes, it is hard to translate ‘party identification’ into Turkish. He reports that focus group discussions suggested that the concept of tutmak, with its connotations of deep and intense feelings towards an object, best corresponds to this concept in Turkish. We adopt this concept to identify partisans in our sample.
12. Another potential explanatory factor could be President Erdoğan’s favourability rating. We have such a measure that is highly correlated with partisanship, and especially with AKP and CHP partisanship – the correlation coefficient between Erdoğan favourability rating and, respectively, AKP and CHP partisanship in the post-November survey are 0.76 and –0.53. The favourability rating of Erdoğan is positively correlated with support for presidentialism after controlling for variables considered in the study as well. Yet the inclusion of this variable does not lead to a substantive change in any of our results (presented in the online appendix). We believe partisanship patterns reflect well views about Erdoğan, and, given the idiosyncratic nature of this explanatory factor and no substantive change in our results, we prefer not to include it in our specifications.
13. For the panel respondents, this question was asked only in the pre-June wave. Analyses of the post-June and post-November waves use the pre-June measurement.
14. This question was not asked in the post-June wave of the panel. The analysis of the post-June wave employed the pre-June measurement.
15. The percentage of respondents who are unsure or do not respond to our question are the missing category in the figures, so that adding them to the two categories presented (support/oppose) would lead to 100 per cent for each group.
16. Analyses using multinomial logistic regression instead of the ordered probit regressions reported in the article yield no substantive changes in results; see the online appendix.
17. In December 2012 Erdoğan announced that his government (through the National Intelligence Organization) had been conducting talks with PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan. These negotiations, which led to a declaration of a ceasefire by PKK in March 2013, were expected to culminate in a peaceful solution to the conflict. Yet this fragile peace process effectively ended in June 2015 and hostilities resumed. The reasons behind the collapse of the process have been the subject of much debate.
18. We thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing out this possibility.
19. See Aytaç and Öniş (Citation2014) on the populist aspect of Erdoğan’s rule.
20. As mentioned earlier, the constitutional amendment proposal needs at least 330 votes in parliament to allow a referendum. While both the AKP and MHP leaderships threw their support behind the proposal and the two parties’ combined number of seats in parliament is comfortably beyond the threshold of 330, the mandatory secret ballot procedure inevitably adds an element of uncertainty. Nevertheless, past experience has shown that parties have devised ways to circumvent the secret ballot procedures, and thus it is rather unlikely that the 330-vote requirement will be an obstacle to the proposal being put to a referendum.