A Model of Dynamic Flows: Explaining Turkey’s Interprovincial Migration

Abstract

The flow of resources across nodes over time (e.g., migration, financial transfers, peer-to-peer interactions) is a common phenomenon in sociology. Standard statistical methods are inadequate to model such interdependent flows. We propose a hierarchical Dirichlet-multinomial regression model and a Bayesian estimation method. We apply the model to analyze 25,632,876 migration instances that took place between Turkey’s 81 provinces from 2009 to 2018. We then discuss the methodological and substantive implications of our results. Methodologically, we demonstrate the predictive advantage of our model compared to its most common alternative in migration research, the gravity model. We also discuss our model in the context of other approaches, mostly developed in the social networks literature. Substantively, we find that population, economic prosperity, the spatial and political distance between the origin and destination, the strength of the AKP (Justice and Development Party) in a province, and the network characteristics of the provinces are important predictors of migration, whereas the proportion of ethnic minority Kurds in a province has no positive association with in- and out-migration.

Making Sense of Honor Killings?

“…Because there is no official data on ethnic identity in Turkey, we use Turkey's Demographic and Health Survey 2008 and 2013 waves to estimate proportion of Kurds in a province (Hacettepe University 2013; Koc, Hancioglu, and Cavlin 2008) as suggested in Aksoy and Yildirim (2024) and applying the survey weights and taking the 2008 and 2013 averages.…”