ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how political parties respond to the Kurdish issue. By employing a deductive approach, this chapter tests whether the Position, Saliency, and Ownership [PSO] theory can predict the Kurdish party vote share based on the strategies employed by the mainstream parties.
Quantitative text analysis of 188 parliamentary group speeches reveals that after extending the ethno-territorial party demands, the PSO theory correctly predicted the increase in the ethno-territorial party’s vote share in the 2011 national elections in Turkey. The mainstream parties’ alternative strategy, issue compartmentalization, had been previously overlooked due to a restricted definition of ethno-territorial party demands.
With regard to the explaining-outcome process-tracing, this chapter reveals three predicted evidences for the proposed hypotheses. The dominant mainstream party pursues a strategy to win over the Turkish median voter by taking a position closer to the Turkish nationalist party. Simultaneously, it manipulates the issue saliency and claims to be the owner of the Kurdish issue to attract the Kurdish median voter. Pursuing two strategies at the same time to attract both ethnic median voter groups can be explained by the third predicted evidence, that is, the intertwinement of secular versus pro-Islamist rhetoric and the ethnic dimension.
