Culture, Socio-Economic Development, and Refugee Immigration: A Spatial Analysis of the 2017 Referendum in Turkey

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2019-04-01

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Özen, İlhan Can

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The 2017 referendum on controversial constitutional amendments witnessed a ercecompetition in Turkey. Despite the joint campaign of AK Party (current ruling party)and MHP (nationalist party), the electoral outcome yielded only a slight edge for ac-cepting the amendments (Yes 51%, No 49%). Why was there such a narrow marginof victory? What explains the defection among MHP voters at the aggregate level?Our paper examines these questions through a unique dataset along with spatially-autoregressive and multilevel modeling techniques. We collect the sub-provincial andprovincial level electoral results since 2002, and match them with the 2004 socioeco-nomic development data from the Ministry of Development and the 2017 developmentdata from the Ministry of Health. In addition, we add provincial level mosque infor-mation, and sub-provincial level o cial Syrian refugee numbers to the dataset. Theadvanced geospatial and multilevel models show strong empirical support for our hy-potheses. Cultural indicators are as likely as socioeconomic features to explain the 2017referendum results in Turkey after controlling for political factors. The number of Syr-ian refugees in provinces diminishes the level of support for \yes" whereas the numberof mosques boosts its support. The refugee migration also explains the MHP voterswho defected in the referendum: the higher the number of refugees in a sub-province,the more likely that the voters in that sub-province vote against the constitutionalamendments. All models show that voting in Turkey has considerable levels of spatialdependency - the neighborhood matters.

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https://hdl.handle.net/11511/96652

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Department of Economics, Article

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Citation Formats

İ. C. Özen, “Culture, Socio-Economic Development, and Refugee Immigration: A Spatial Analysis of the 2017 Referendum in Turkey,” 2019, Accessed: 00, 2022. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/96652.