ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes how relevant economic voting behavior was for the 2018 Turkish general election. Drawing on the nationally representative post-election sample of the 2018 Turkish Election Study (TES) survey, the economy was found to indeed play an important role in voters’ electoral choices: even after taking into account several demographic and socio-economic factors. Voters who had a more positive evaluation about the economy were more likely to vote for the incumbent Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP). It is also observed that the specific type of individuals’ economic evaluations, that is, sociotropic vs. pocketbook or retrospective vs. prospective, does not seem to matter – each of them has a positive effect on the likelihood of voting for the AKP and the magnitudes of the effects are very close to each other. While economic evaluations were a critical determinant of vote choice in the 2018 election, these evaluations were also significantly affected by partisanship. The role of motivated reasoning in the shaping of economic evaluations seems to be at work in the Turkish case as well, in line with findings in the literature.
