Personalization and Campaign Finance in Turkey’s Closed List System

A general expectation in the literature is that closed list proportional systems (PR) generate party-centered campaigns where campaign financing is regulated centrally focusing on the political parties (Katz and Mair 1995; Johnson 2008). However, the increasing personalization of election campaigns shifts the focus away from political parties onto individual candidates. This paper investigates a critical contradiction in the Turkish party law modelled for party-centric and centrally funded political parties: while the legal framework heavily regulates the campaign financing for political parties, it is silent on private contributions to individual candidates which creates a gray zone. This could potentially affect candidates’ use of campaign resources, especially those candidates unable to receive sufficient funds from their party and wary of openly soliciting contributions in a vague legal context, may rely on their personal wealth as the only reliable source of campaign finance. This can affect democratic representation, as already underlined by Witko (2017) unregulated systems are more likely to result in the upper-class bias. Our interviews and survey results show that personalized campaigns lead to higher campaign spending, for which candidates mostly rely on private funds with little contribution from the political parties. Relatedly, recent studies show that women candidates rely on higher party contributions than their own resources in comparison to men candidates (Sudulich et al. 2025). Our candidate survey data also reveals that male candidates spend significantly more than female candidates, and fund more of their campaign through personal resources, leading to a distinct financial hurdle for women candidates. We argue that legal ambiguity in closed-list PR systems with respect to candidates’ ability to raise funds in a highly personalized political context operates as a mechanism that undermines financial transparency and distorts candidate pools.