Voter Religiosity Promoting Party-Voter Congruence on the ‘Super Issue’ in Turkey

İngilizce (OpenAlex)

This research was set out to explore empirically party-voter congruence on the‘super issue’ of Left-Right (L-R) ideological positioning from a responsiveness perspective inTurkey. It aims to reveal the extent political parties respond to voters’ movement in the ideologicalspectrum and the role of voter religiosity in determining the magnitude of this response. Thisresearch covers a period exceeding half a century consisting past eighteen general elections heldbetween 1950 and 2018. It combines party-level and individual-level data acquired from ManifestoProject (MP) and World Values Survey (WVS) datasets respectively. Findings suggest that voterreligiosity plays an important role in maintaining party-voter ideological correspondence inTurkey. The level of voter religiosity determines the extent political parties align themselves withtheir own voters’ ideological preference as well as dealign themselves from that of the most votedrival political party voters.