Introduction

This chapter introduces this book’s research question and contribution, aiming to uncover the causal mechanism connecting mainstream parties’ strategies and ethno-territorial vote share by conducting explaining-outcome process-tracing on a specific case – the Kurdish opening process in Turkey. There are five points of importance: three theoretical, one case specific, and one methodological contribution. At the theoretical level, analyzing a gray-zone country like Turkey requires bridging between the existing literature on established and new democracies. This analysis is one of the first examples of examining the interaction between mainstream and ethno-territorial parties in a single case study. Last, the book answers an important question: what motivates a dominant party to enter a new issue dimension? At the case-specific level, this book provides the first systematic analysis of the Kurdish opening process. In this sense, it will not only detail the way the Turkish government and parties handle the Kurdish issue, but also depict whether this process can be taken as a rolemodel for other countries with a Kurdish population. Methodologically, this book provides one of the rare examples of the application of the process-tracing methodology besides first to utilize unsupervised text scaling on the ethnic dimension in a new democracy