INTERVIEW: Michael Wuthrich on the history of elections in Turkey and the future of Turkish democracy

The belief that Turkish politics has for decades been defined by unchanging cultural divides is very widely held. An essential cleavage between religious and secular, educated and uneducated, central and peripheral voters is said to be the essential dynamic underpinning decades of political turbulence. 

American political scientist Michael Wuthrich challenges this in his book "National Elections in Turkey" (reviewed in HDN here). Through close analysis of electoral data and campaigns since 1950, Wuthrich shows how Turkish voters have primarily been motivated by material and economic considerations, with ideological considerations a distant second.

He argues that today's social divides are real but they cannot be mapped neatly onto political preferences in previous decades. The empirical data paints a far richer and more complicated picture. However, Wuthrich also suggests that this kind of close attention to electoral dynamics may now be a historical relic as Turkey moves to an authoritarian, dominant single-party system.

He spoke to the Hürriyet Daily News about the history of elections in Turkey and the future of Turkish democracy.

Belief in essential "center-periphery" divides going back decades are very popular in Turkey. But you paint a more complex picture. What's the argument you put forward in the book? 

The book is intended to respond to several different existing approaches to elections in Turkey. One major approach was to assume that the Turkish electorate or voters were static in their voting: They voted according to social cleavages and identities, and tended to hold onto that regardless of what was happening. Another problematic approach to studying elections has been paying attention to just the campaign...