1 Advances in Political Economy - Department of Political Science

EDITOR’S PROOF

Spatial Model of Elections in Turkey 325

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Fig. 2 Local Nash

equilibrium

B&W IN PRINT

By using simulation, we found another LNE with the following party positions:

z 1 =

⎡

⎣

Party AKP CHP MHP DTP DYP ANAP

x:religion 0. 02 0. 05 0. 08 − 1. 24 0. 12 0. 12

y:nationalism 0. 02 0. 04 0. 05 − 0. 70. 05 0. 05

⎤

⎦

As can be seen in Fig.2, all the parties other than DTP are concentrated around the

electoral mean and DTP is on the southwest of the graph. The difference between

the initial party positions and the party positions at the equilibrium is given by the

following matrix:

z∗−z 1 =

⎡

⎣

Party AKP CHP MHP DTP DYP ANAP

x:religion 0. 29 − 0. 72 − 0. 05 1. 14 − 0. 08 − 0. 58

y:nationalism 0. 05 − 0. 13 0. 11 − 0. 70. 17 − 0. 29

⎤

⎦

This matrix shows how much and in which direction the parties are pulled from the

equilibrium point by the party activists. The most obvious differences are seen in

the positions of CHP and DTP. The former takes a position far to the left of the

equilibrium position on the religion axis and the latter takes a position far to the

south of the equilibrium position on the nationalism axis. The predicted vote shares

at the equilibrium were calculated as:

ρz^1 =

(

ρzAKP^1 ,ρzCHP^1 ,ρMHPz^1 ,ρDTPz^1 ,ρDYPz^1 ,ρANAPz^1

)

=( 0. 539 , 0. 245 , 0. 131 , 0. 03 , 0. 03 , 0. 025 )

Compared to the sample vote shares the equilibrium provides a higher predicted

vote share for CHP, DTP and ANAP.

Finally, we supplement the spatial model with the demographic characteristics of

voters. Following previous studies, we include age, education, ethnicity and socio-

economic status as independent variables. We measure ethnicity by the primary lan-

guage that the respondents speak at home and construct it as a dummy variable that

takes the value 1 for Zaza and Kurdish, and 0 for Turkish and all other languages.^9

(^9) See Appendix2 for the list of questions used to measure demographic characteristics.