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

Abstract

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 in Turkey. It aims to reveal the extent political parties respond to voters’ movement in the ideological spectrum and the role of voter religiosity in determining the magnitude of this response. This research covers a period exceeding half a century consisting past eighteen general elections held between 1950 and 2018. It combines party-level and individual-level data acquired from Manifesto Project (MP) and World Values Survey (WVS) datasets respectively. Findings suggest that voter religiosity plays an important role in maintaining party-voter ideological correspondence in Turkey. The level of voter religiosity determines the extent political parties align themselves with their own voters’ ideological preference as well as dealign themselves from that of the most voted rival political party voters.