When choosers became perpetrators: determinants of pre-electoral violence on the peoples democratic party to the june 2015 general election in Turkey

Official URL: http://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b1648977 (Table of Contents)

his study empirically analyzes the spatial variation of pre-electoral attacks on the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), a pro-Kurdish opposition party, prior to the June 2015 general election in Turkey. Using different news sources, this research employs a unique mediabased pre-electoral violence dataset which focuses on the hard facts of the news on the preelectoral attacks against the HDP between February 1 and June 7, 2015. I develop a theoretical foundation for the empirical investigation of my study to demonstrate why some provinces experienced more attacks vis-à-vis others based on the electoral, historical and socio-economic determinants of attacks. To this end, the spatial variation of attacks on the HDP is explained by the factors that facilitate participation in these attacks. The results show that spatial variation across the provinces can be explained to a great extent by the following provincial characteristics: lower vote shares between the AKP and HDP, higher security force casualties, higher urbanization rates are conducive to the outbreak of preelectoral attacks on the HDP, whereas level of economic activity, unemployment rate, percentage of Kurdish population and vote shares of Turkish nationalist parties did not produce statistically significant results at the province level.