Empirical Results on the Predictive Power of Basic Personal Values and Core Political Attitudes in Turkish Politics

Abstract

Using data from a 2009 survey of electoral tendencies, we investigate the predictive power of Turkish people’s basic personal values and core political attitudes in explaining their political choices. Through logit analysis and the comparison of the sub-sample means of the available variables, we examine the characteristics of the voters of the two major parties of the political scene, namely the Justice and Development Party and the Republican People’s Party. Our main finding is that in the presence of the more conventional determinants of party choice such as education and the placement on the left-right scale, values and attitudes contribute little to the prediction of the choice between the two parties in question.

Keywords: basic personal values, core political attitudes, party choice, Turkish politics

JEL Classification: D72