AKP's electoral victories

In his article, K. Cinar argues that the state of the economy and the provision of public services are statistically significant, just as religiosity indicated by "preacher school attendance", for AKP support. Hence, a bad economy means less support for the AKP. 

Below you'll find an excerpt of his article. The table is explained in the note within the picture.

"Evidence of “economic voting” can also be found in the statistical analyses. Longitudinal analyses of individual elections [2002, 2007, 2011] show that both unemployment and percentage of province population out of social security negatively correlate with the AKP vote and seat shares. The impact of unemployment has risen statistically from the 2002 election to the succeeding elections, as evidenced by increased coefficients and t-scores. A one unit increase in the percentage of the unemployed caused a 1.8% decrease in AKP vote shares and 2.8% decrease in AKP seat shares in the most recent 2011 election. In a similar vein, the effect of the percentage of population out of social security increases over time, as evidenced by its ascending impact on AKP seat share regressions. A one unit increase in this figure led to 1.6% decrease in AKP seat shares in the 2007 election and 1.8% decrease in AKP seat shares in the 2011 election.

Furthermore, ordered logit regressions show that unemployment at the locality level hinders the occurrence of AKP’s electoral hegemony (“AKP Wins”). Simulations show that a 5% increase in the percentage of the unemployment in a province (from 5% to 10%) decreases the probability of the AKP electoral hegemony (that is, AKP Win = 3) by 27.2%. These results confirm that, contrary to established hegemonies, emerging hegemonies are affected by economic slumps. Hypothesis 3 regarding economic voting holds in light of these results. Voters reward the governing party for better services and punish them due to bad economic outcomes. Localities with better provision of public services and lower levels of unemployment are more likely to produce a strong electoral hegemony, as evidenced by the AKP case."

- Kursat Cinar (2016) Local determinants of an emerging electoral hegemony: the case of Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey, Democratization, 23:7, 1216-1235, DOI: 10.1080/13510347.2015.1077228