Clientelism in Contemporary Turkish Politics

In this paper we aim to analyze the dynamics and mechanisms of clientelism in Turkey and disentangle the role of political parties in clientelist relations. Our main interest is to elaborate the relationship between resource allocation practices of political parties and the voting behavior of low-income groups. Based on the assumption that municipalities play a central role in machine politics our research design is based on municipal politics in the period between 2011-2014. Municipalities in Turkey control a variety of areas such as employment, permits, social schemes, so that they have various resources that might be channeled for clientelistic purposes. In this study we focus on social schemes developed by these political parties for low income families. While municipalities are the only route to clientelism for opposition parties, the incumbent party also has access to central state bureaucracy for resources. Thus in addition to the municipality in each district we are interested in the role of the district governorship in machine politics. We have limited the research on the strategies of clientelism of two parties in Turkey, AKP and CHP in order to capture variation in resource allocation across incumbent and opposition parties in two cities, Istanbul and Izmir, and two districts in each city. We have made our selections such that in each cluster we had variation in the party that has the highest voting share in the city and the districts in the last municipal elections. Our findings are based on the semi-structured interviews with 200 randomly selected households in the lower-income neighborhoods in each district. In addition, we have interviewed the party representatives at the district and neighborhood level to understand the way parties operate in these neighborhoods and to reveal the mechanisms they use to mobilize electoral support.