Introduction to Turkey’s electoral geography: An overview since 1950

Turkish politics have been characterized by “three maladies” since the 1970s: fragmentation, volatility, and polarization. Geography, in any case, is not a frozen and well-defined territory in political means. The electoral geography literature is, to a large extent, dominated by empirical research and mostly focused on North American and west European cases. The literature suffers from a scarcity of studies dealing with non-western politics that may bring new insight into geographical dimensions of electoral behavior. In terms of the electoral geography in Turkish politics, comprehensive studies are still extremely scarce in the literature, apart from a few works that concentrate on electoral choices in particular regions or districts. From the beginning of multiparty politics in 1950 to the 1980 military coup, center-right and center-left political parties were dominant players, with no distinct variation in their regional performances.