The Turkish political landscape
AS MUNICIPALITY elections approach, bargaining is the agenda of the day. We may call it pre-play negotiations, an expression borrowed from game theory. In İstanbul, the hotspot of the competition, Başak Demirtaş withdrew her candidacy, which implies two things. First, Kurdish voters might indeed consider İmamoğlu as the natural leader of the main opposition party CHP and possibly the only contender to Erdoğan. Second, Kurdish voters may not have liked the idea that DEM (formerly HDP and after that, Yeşil Sol) would be the reason why İstanbul is lost. True, there will possibly be another candidate but a low profile candidate is not the same thing as Başak Demirtaş. The other side of the coin is YRP (Yeniden Refah Partisi). If DEM voters continue to vote for İmamoğlu the counter-move for Murat Kurum, the AKP candidate, would be to secure the support of YRP voters. In Ankara, I do not think DEM’s choice will change much. Mansur Yavaş is likely to get votes from conservative and nationalist voters, not from DEM supporters anyway. The c. 3% of DEM voters in Ankara obviously matters but not as much as İstanbul where DEM (as Yeşil Sol) gathered c. 8%. The way I see it AKP is close to winning but whether this will be a sweeping victory is unknown. İstanbul will be a close call.
WHY DO LOCAL ELECTIONS MATTER?
Of course they matter. They matter qua local elections because which party wins the municipality has a lot to do with culture, life style, resources and such. It is like a touch of fate browsing the lives of those directly concerned. However, what is even more important is the prospect of a new constitutional referendum. In Turkey, very seldom do constitutional referenda enhance liberties. A sweeping AKP victory will tell a lot about what will be at stake in a possible referendum. Because the ruling party uses every indicator, and certainly all votes, as a barometer, its relative success or failure in the upcoming elections will shape the subject matter of the referendum.
PRESIDENTS
I will enumerate a few takeaways from the presidential election games literature. They also apply to coalition-building and to forming blocs in order to solve constitutional quandaries. William Riker had proposed a “size principle” back in 1962. Accordingly, coalitions that are overstretched, i.e. that become oversized, disappear. This was the case with Bush in 2000 and 2004 or with Reagan in the 1980s. Contrary to the median voter theorem (MTV), candidates can be compelled either in the primaries or if this does not apply, in the pre-play negotiations game to occupy relatively extreme positions. This is so especially if there are strong ideologies involved or if there are different core beliefs in the society. To be or appear to be extremely nationalistic can help a candidate to have an edge, for instance. Only after a coalition around a strong belief is forged the candidates shift towards the median voter in order to appease discontent at the political centre. This way she can shift the centre towards a new, more radical centre. This is important because whether the opposition bloc was clearly overstretched before the May 2023 presidential elections. The incumbent bloc could also have become overstretched with the participation of two extreme right parties, but this did not happen. That both alliances reached to the tails of the political-cum-ideological distribution imply either that the median voter may not have been happy and turnout
could have fallen –which did not happen at all- or that the respective centres of the two blocs shifted toward extremes. In the end it is the incumbent bloc’s alliance decision that paid off. The opposition bloc became overstretched and could not deliver the support it promised to Kılıçdaroğlu.
MUNICIPALITIES
Now local elections are different. In many towns the candidate is all the more important. Where I currently live, the difference between city council votes, which generally speaking reflect party preferences, and the mayor’s election –which is bent on the candidate qua person- there was a 4.5% difference in 2019. The candidate would have won anyway but the difference between the winner and the runner-up would have been halved had it not been the personality of the candidate. This is normal but because in the House of Representatives elections there is no single-member district system here, we are accustomed to see all votes as votes that accrue either to the party leader or to the party ideology. In local elections, something like a (perhaps remote) resemblance of the single-member district system is at play. Candidates may not be entirely viewed as incarnations of ideas or replicas of national party leaders but as local folks either admired by other local folks who know them for decades –or not. However, more often than not local elections are portrayed by political parties as extensions of the national competition, a race between political ideologies. Even international politics can be referred to during municipality election campaigns, which is indeed odd to say the least. Presidential elections are entirely different from local and House of Representatives elections. They are on a par with constitutional referenda. Constitutional change may admit belief cascades because quandaries my not be solved unless there is sea-change.
BELIEF CASCADES
Consider the U.S where there is a presidential system. It is different from the Turkish case but after all they both are presidential systems. There are many instances of sudden belief changes or ‘belief cascades’, strategic voting, and grand coalition formations in American political history – obviously also in world history. Consider the Madison-Jefferson equilibrium –as Norman Schofield has put it- of the 1790s that led to Jefferson winning in 1800 as a result of the alignment of land and agrarian labour. The anti-Malthusian optimistic view advocated by Condorcet –and directly conveyed to Jefferson in private conversationsled Jefferson believe that an agrarian surplus-exporting America would have uphold a balance between landed interests of the South and commercial/industrial interests of the North. The resulting equilibrium lasted for about 60 years after which the civil war finally broke out. Similarly, there are other episodes of radical belief and political alignment shifts, namely 1857-1861, 1896, 1932, 1964 and 2000.
CONSTITUTIONAL REFERENDA
Norman Schofield, a first-rated mathematical economist, has also worked on the theory and practices of American politics. The first conjecture is that over a century, “core beliefs” did not change. In other words, socially conservatives and economically pro-big business voters are still there and they are opposed by liberals –sometimes they may be labelled left libertarians also- and pro-redistribution, more healthcare etc. voters. The two-dimensional, social and economic, policy space remained as it were. However, political alliances changed and so did the positions Democrats and Republicans occupy. In fact, before 1964 Republicans were more liberal than Democrats on civil rights, race issues, liberties etc. Democrats were the social conservatives to an extent back then. The political (electoral) space did not move, but the mapping that assigns various representative positions to party cleavages did. The surface did not change, but the function did. In Turkey, the two-dimensional political space is also sufficient to characterize political diversity. If we come up with an ideology/economy taxonomy, and divide it further into four quadrants –liberal (left) economy/conservative ideology + liberal economy/liberal ideology + conservative economy/conservative ideology + conservative economy/liberal ideology- that would cover enough space, I think. In lieu of liberal, one is tempted to write ‘modern’. The left/right divide is not as important as it was to or three decades ago. However, it may be more accurate if we claim that both the surface and the function did change in Turkey over the last two decades. This is what renders an otherwise hardly imaginable incumbent party win even after so many years of political depreciation and economic woes that are now transparent to all voters. This is because politics involve a much deeper ideological root and many politicians aspire to be architects of social change. This seldom happens in the U.S. although it has perhaps already happened here. We will see that in late March.