"Let Them Take a Bus Instead": How Intimidation Affects Turnout and Vote Choice?

• In Event: Making It Easier to Vote

Abstract

Thanks to the election law amended shortly before the announcement of the snap presidential and parliamentary elections on June 24, 2018, the Supreme Election Council (SEC) decided to move and/or merge 2,202 polling stations in 16 predominantly Kurdish provinces in Eastern and Southeastern Turkey. This paper seeks to investigate how those decisions, which made 120,724 voters commute on average 8.7 kilometers, affected voter turnout and the vote shares of the ethno-regional People's Democracy, and incumbent Justice and Development and Nationalist Movement parties, and their presidential candidates.

To this end, we compiled a novel and comprehensive dataset. The geo-coded ward-level dataset we employ allows us to match the polling stations that are moved/merged by the SEC's decisions with those that (were proposed but) are not, and with those that are geographically the most proximate or most similar based on several socio-demographic variables we account for. Whereas the former test allows us to take account of any selection on the part of the officials for some systematic or unsystematic reason, the latter allows us to eliminate the risk of unobserved confounders.

We employ a difference-in-difference design, a more suitable method for making causal inferences than those followed in previous literature, to test our hypotheses that voter intimidation, in the form of moving and merging polling stations, decreases voter turnout and the ethno-regional party and its presidential candidate's vote shares, and increases the incumbent parties' and candidate's vote shares.

The empirical analyses suggest that this form of voter intimidation, similar to those we observe in other countries (e.g., in the US), which requires voters to travel longer distances and, relatedly, increases the cost of voting, significantly affects electoral outcomes. We conclude by discussing the implications of our research from the perspectives of representation, voter intimidation, and competitive authoritarianism.

Authors

• Emre Toros, Hacettepe University

• Mert Moral, Sabancı University

• Melike Ayse Kocacik Senol

• yasemin tosun