The Toss of a Coin: Electoral Policymaking in Turkey from 1980 to 2018

• In Event: Poster Session: Representation and Electoral Systems & Public Opinion and U.S. Politics
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Representation and Electoral Systems

Abstract

In this study, I analyze electoral engineering cases in Turkey between 1980 and 2018, showing that Turkish political parties and policymakers often failed to identify an optimal strategy regarding electoral reform in this period. I first explain the Turkish military’s electoral design targets after its 1980 coup d’état and then discuss how the military was unable to tailor an electoral system that would achieve its aim of limiting the number of effective political parties to just two or three. I also analyze all electoral engineering attempts after civil elections were restored in Turkey, starting with the country’s 1991 elections. Here, I show that the political parties failed to identify an optimal electoral reform strategy roughly 54% of the time overall, while the failure rate was even higher, at 62.5%, among the parties that designed the reforms. I compare reasons for such electoral engineering failures in Turkey—which include the volatility of votes under high electoral thresholds, the overestimation of electoral support, a lack of technical knowledge, the weak institutionalization of political parties, and a lack of reliable polls—with other cases in the literature to pave the way for future research. Examining these electoral engineering cases allows us to gather information to predict the future success or failure of electoral reform decisions.

Author

• Ugurcan Evci, University of California, Irvine