Political climate and regional well-being in Turkey

Abstract

Politicians can use social and economic policies on clientelist grounds neglecting the efficiency and equity concerns of public policy. While incumbents might reward and punish voters based on partyspecific fundamentals, the role of political ideologies and fragmentation is mostly neglected. For societies like Turkey, where the ideological stance is mixed and the level of fragmentation is varying, the regional political climate has implications for regional well-being beyond the borders of political parties. Our findings for the post-2000s validate that regions that are ideologically closer to the right and the incumbent party (Justice and Development Party-AKP-) attain higher well-being, while the opposite is true for ideologically polarized regions and regions closer to left-wing ideologies. Results are robust to the endogeneity of political climate and various model specifications.

Well-Being and Geography: Modelling Differences in Regional Well-Being Profiles in Case of Spatial Dependence—Evidence from Turkey

“…According to Figure 1, regions in the centre and the West have the highest well-being values, whereas regions in the Southeast possess the lowest level of well-being. The distribution of well-being in Figure 1 is highly similar to regional disparities in Turkey [55]. Clusters of low and high well-being values demonstrate the need for empirical evidence to examine spatial effects.…”