Building consensus: shifting strategies in the territorial targeting of Turkey's public transport investment

Abstract

A growing amount of research explores how the allocation of regional development monies follows electoral reasons. Yet, the existing literature on distributive politics provides different and contrasting expectations on which geographical areas will be targeted. We focus on proportional representation (PR) systems. While in such settings governments have incentives to target core districts and punish foes', we suggest that when incumbents attempt to build a state-party image they may broaden the territorial allocation of benefits and even target opposition out-groups. We exploit data on Turkey's public transport investment for the period 2003-2014 and in-depth interviews to provide results in support of our hypothesis.

Determinants of regional distribution of AKP votes: Analysis of post‐2002 parliamentary elections

“…In the discontent literature, long‐term decline in the industry sector increases the likelihood of anti‐establishment vote, but in this setting, higher growth of the industry sector increases the votes of the incumbent party or “content” with the incumbent party. Finally, public investment (either measured in levels or change) is found to be insignificant in explaining the AKP vote share variation across Turkish provinces suggesting that the central government's decision to invest more to its strongholds (see e.g., Luca, 2017; Luca & Rodriguez‐Pose, 2015, 2019) were not a significant factor for the votes received by the AKP.…”

“…Even though previous studies are dealing with the individual factors that influence the voting behaviour post‐2000 (see e.g., Kalaycıoğlu, 2014; Çarkoğlu & Aytaç, 2015 and Fidrmuc & Tunali, 2015; Marschall, Aydogan, & Bulut, 2016; see section 2 for a detailed discussion), to our knowledge, no single study examined how the vote share of AKP varies regionally during its successful period. Besides, while studies examine the impact of distributive politics for local development (Luca, 2016; Luca & Rodriguez‐Pose, 2015, 2019), we lack in evidence whether these distributive tools influence regional voting patterns. Henceforth, this paper aims to investigate the role of socio‐economic (e.g., see the set of indicators listed in Becker, Fetzer, and Novy (2017) and Cinar (2016)) and distributive politics factors (i.e., central governments allocation of investments across regions) in the votes received by the AKP in the 2002, 2007, 2011, 2015 and 2018 parliamentary elections in Turkey.…”

“…We expect a positive sign for the public investment coefficient since it may contribute to the welfare of the locals of the relevant province and hence increase the vote share of the incumbent party. This variable will also enable us to test whether the public investments made by the central government was rewarded or not since there is a stream of literature that identified the role of distributive politics in Turkey (Luca, 2017; Luca & Rodriguez‐Pose, 2015, 2019) but no previous work has examined whether voters rewarded these investments, which we will examine in this paper. GDP per capita (2009 prices) measures the standard of living, and we expect a positive and significant sign for this variable.…”

“…In the initial phase, the AKP sought the votes of the conservative groups, but then during the late 2000s, AKP started to become the dominant party in the Turkish politics pushing for competitive authoritarianism (Esen & Gumuscu, 2016). In the third phase, after 2009s, the AKP started negotiations with the Peoples' Democratic Party (Halkların Demokratik Partisi— HDP), a political party dominantly receiving votes from the Kurdish minorities to establish a state‐party image where Luca and Rodriguez‐Pose (2019) found that there has been a reduction in the use of public investment as a tool to punish strategically constituencies voting for the pro‐Kurdish party between 2009 and 2014. However, the so‐called democratic discussions between the HDP and AKP concluded without any success in 2015, which has deepened the internal divisions between AKP and non‐AKP voters (Özpek, 2018).…”

The Topography and Sources of Multidimensional Poverty in Turkey

“…A closely related dimension is the instrumental influence of distributive politics in Turkey. As argued in Luca and Rodríguez-Pose (2015), Luca (2016), Luca and Rodríguez-Pose (2019), electoral outcomes affect regional growth and public investment. Regions voting for the incumbent realize more regional growth and receive more public investment.…”