EDITOR’S PROOF
Spatial Model of Elections in Turkey 321185
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230Fig. 1 Voter distribution and
party positions in the 2007
electionidentify the issues that differentiate voters from each other. We start with a long list
of questions about the attitudes of voters toward religion and nationalism as well
as economic and social issues.^6 Similar to previous studies, our analysis shows that
religion and nationalism are principal dimensions that characterize the ideological
position of Turkish voters.^7
Figure1 shows the position of voters with thexaxis corresponding to the religion
dimension and theyaxis corresponding to the nationalism dimension. A movement
from left to right on thexaxis indicates a view that favors an increasing role of
religion in private and public life. A movement from south to north on theyaxis
indicates an increasing association with Turkish nationalism. The variance on the
xaxis is 0.729 while the variance on theyaxis is 0.498. The covariance between
the two axes is 0.073. Thus the voter covariance matrix is the 2×2 matrix:∇=[
0 .729 0. 073
0 .073 0. 498]with trace(∇)= 1 .227. The covariance matrix reveals two important points that
differ from the analysis of previous elections.^8 First, the variance on the nation-
alism dimension is considerably smaller. The majority of voters are concentrated
on the northern part of Fig.1 with higher levels of association with Turkish na-
tionalism. There is another group of voters concentrated on the southern part of
the figure, most of whom are the voters of the pro-Kurdish DTP. Second, the co-
variance between the two axes is considerably smaller, which implies that the atti-
tudes toward nationalism are not related very strongly to the attitudes toward reli-
gion.
The position of parties is calculated by taking the mean position of its voters on
the religion and nationalism dimensions respectively. The party positions are given
by the following matrix:(^6) The questions used in the factor analysis and the model are listed in Appendix1.
(^7) The factor loadings of the analysis are given in Appendix2 (Table6).
(^8) See Carkoglu and Hinich ( 2006 ) and Schofield et al. ( 2011 ) for a spatial analysis of 1999 and
2002 elections in Turkey.