Economic voting theory: Turkiye case 1998-2003

Abstract

The article provides a general information about the theory of economic voting and points out that there is no -this-theory-based- studies to estimate the voters' behaviours in Turkey. And then, a brief overview takes place about the political life with the multi-parties of the country. Remaining pages are mainly for the explanations of the method and tools used by the author to provide an outcome from the data and results a survey had been conducted by a private research and consultancy corporation (PIAR in short).

The author presents and also summarizes the article as such; theories of economic voting which show relationship between the voters' choice and economic condition, consist of voting and popularity functions. These two functions analyse the same area, but the only difference is in their periods. Voting function is modelling the relationships between economic performance and political support using voting data at election time. During the election periods, feelings about parties, party leaders and economic situations are measured by using data getting from the public opinion polls, such models are known as popularity functions. This study analyses popularity function through using the public survey data. The results have demonstrated that economic conditions have important impacts on government popularity. Inflation has negative impact on incumbent governments. However, economic growth helps government popularity with a lag.