Electoral rules and strategic voting in Turkey

Abstract

In the rst chapter, we construct and analyze counterfactual election results under di erent electoral rules and levels of strategic voting. We rst divide each of the existing 85 districts in order to de ne 550 hypothetical voting districts, and then use precinct level data from the actual elections in order to calculate counterfactual results under a First-Past-the-Post (FPTP) rule. Under a simply tally of the actual votes according to our newly de ned districts, the number of AKP (Justice and Development Party) seats increases to 414 from the actual 327 in 2011 and to 349 from the actual 258 in 2015 (June), while the number of seats of the biggest loser, the Nationalist Action Party (MHP), decreases from the actual 53 to just three in 2011 and from the actual 80 to only six in 2015. Next, we simulate results assuming that some \strategic" voters vote only for parties which are competitive in their voting districts by using survey data. We show that strategic voting has only a minor impact on the results. In both elections, MHP is the biggest bene ciary of strategic voting proportionately. In the second chapter, we use survey data in order to nd out the magnitude of strategic voting that HDP bene ts in the 2015 June elections. We apply Artabe and Gardeazabal (2014)'s indirect method of strategic voting. We estimate that 8.6% of HDP votes came from strategic considerations in the 2015 June elections.