An Analysis of the Ideological Space Underlying Turkish Party Preferences, Spring 2002

The paper focuses on party choice of Turkish voters. The spatial model of voting  that was successfuly applied in many other country contexts is adopted. The paper  aims to grasp the cognitive organisation of voters’ attitudes about issues and evaluations of political parties. A spatial map is derived from a recent survey of urban settlers that show a dominant cleavage between secularists and pro-Islamists. The second dimension shows the influence of recent conflict involving the Kurdish minority on rising nationalist sentiments. Given a general depiction of the spatial map of voters, implications for the Turkish party system  and understanding of the structure of party constituencies from especially a demographic and self-ascribed identity perspectives are discussed.