Routledge Turkey's Electoral Geography: Trends, Behaviors, and Identities (Routledge Studies in Middle Eastern Politics)

Analyzing Turkey’s electoral geography, this volume evaluates the geographical repercussions of the elections in Turkey since the establishment of multiparty politics in 1950. The book focuses on the last two decades, examining the interaction between electoral behavior and regional dynamics. Various issues related to the geographical connotations of Turkish electoral politics are qualitatively and quantitatively addressed by scholars with diverse backgrounds in social sciences. The chapters herein examine how Turkey’s electoral geography has been shaped over the years to correspond with a certain aspect of multiparty politics, such as voting behaviors, political parties and party systems, nationalization and regionalization, redistricting, gender issues, identity dynamics, or ideological polarization. This comprehensive work contributes to the theoretical debates in electoral geography in general. Utilizing notions from electoral geography literature, this book develops new concepts through the Turkish case. Filling an important gap in the literature on Turkish politics, this contemporary analysis will be a key resource to policymakers, students, and scholars interested in political science, Turkey, and the Middle East. About the Author Edip Asaf Bekaroğlu earned his PhD in political science at Bilkent University, Turkey in 2010. Since then, he has worked as a full time faculty member at İstanbul University’s Department of Political Science and International Relations. His research interests are democratization, political parties and elections, secularism, and multiculturalism. Gülsen Kaya Osmanbaşoğlu earned her PhD in political science at Bilkent University in 2014. She is a faculty member at the Social Sciences University of Ankara, Department of Political Science and Public Administration, and the deputy director of Social Innovation Center (ASBU11 SIM). Her research interests are Turkish politics, political parties and elections, modernization, human rights, and social innovation.