A spatial analysis of Turkish party preferences

The paper focuses on party preferences of Turkish voters within the spatial model of voting that proved to be a successful explanatory framework in various other countries. The analysis is based on spatial theory of electoral competition and its statistical implementation using survey data. The paper aims at depicting the cognitive organization of voters' attitudes about issues and evaluations of political parties that compete for their vote. The spatial map derived from a survey of urban settlers show that the dominant ideological dimension sets secularists vs. pro-Islamists as expected from the center-periphery framework often used in Turkish electoral analyses. The second dimension reflects the impact of recent conflict involving the Kurdish minority on rising nationalist sentiments. Given a general depiction of the Turkish political space, we examine the impact of various demographic characteristics as well as issue evaluations on individuals' ideal positions in the space. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.