Regional cleavages in Turkish politics: An electoral geography of the 1999 and 2002 national elections

The 1999 and 2002 national parliamentary elections in Turkey display similar patterns of regional political affiliation. Integrating theories of political cleavages with the techniques of electoral geography, this article examines the overlapping cultural and economic constitution of these patterns. Cleavage theories have lacked an explicitly spatial connection between the divisions investigated and the populations these divisions are supposed to represent. Adding this connection and a more significant consideration of the impacts of state administration on these divisions expands cleavage theoryʹs usefulness for electoral geography. In the case of Turkey, cluster analyses of the provincial results from each election display a strong tri-partite regionalization within the electoral geography of the country. By comparing the levels of support for different parties in each region with their respective political platforms, it is found that four major divisions are shaping the electoral geography: religion, ethnicity, regional economic prosperity, and previous state association. This phenomenon is explained in part by the repressive surveillance of a military apparatus that is both secular and Turkish nationalist in orientation and the dependent position of Turkey as a non-core state within the global economic system.