Cem Baslevent

Are Married Women in Turkey More Likely to Become Added or Discouraged Workers

The purpose of this study is to examine the labour market outcomes of married couples to find out which of the added and discouraged worker effects is dominant in urban Turkish families. Using household labour force survey and province-level data from 1988 and 1994, we look for evidence regarding the dependency of the labour force participation decisions of wives and the employment status of their husbands. On yearly and pooled samples of married couples in their prime ages, bivariate probit estimates indicate that the two decisions are negatively correlated. However, the correlation is found to be statistically significant only in the economic crisis year of 1994. We interpret this finding to mean that the added worker effect dominates the discouraged worker effect.

Personal Values and Political Activism: A Cross-National Study

Using data from 28 countries in four continents, the present research addresses the question of how basic values may account for political activism. Study 1 (N = 35,116) analyses data from representative samples in 20 countries that responded to the 21-item version of the Portrait Values Questionnaire (PVQ-21) in the European Social Survey. Study 2 (N = 7,773) analyses data from adult samples in six of the same countries (Finland, Germany, Greece, Israel, Poland, and United Kingdom) and eight other countries (Australia, Brazil, Chile, Italy, Slovakia, Turkey, Ukraine, and United States) that completed the full 40-item PVQ. Across both studies, political activism relates positively to self-transcendence and openness to change values, especially to universalism and autonomy of thought, a subtype of self-direction. Political activism relates negatively to conservation values, especially to conformity and personal security. National differences in the strength of the associations between individual values and political activism are linked to level of democratization.

Voter Profiles and Fragmentation in the Turkish Party System

Based on the multinomial logit estimates of an individual vote intention function, we perform restriction tests to make pairwise comparisons of the voter profiles of the major political parties in Turkey. The economic variables in the model are items that represent the well known hypotheses of economic voting theory, i.e. whether individuals vote retrospectively and/or prospectively, and whether they are sociotropic and/or pocketbook. The non-economic factors include socio-demographic characteristics as well as issues and identity variables that are likely to be good predictors of the party choice. In many cases, restriction tests provide evidence refuting the general view that the Turkish party system is artificially fragmented.

Persistence in regional voting patterns in Turkey during a period of major political realignment

Using province-level data from five nationwide elections held during the past decade, we examine the main voting patterns in Turkey. By means of cluster analysis, we classify the 81 provinces according to vote shares of the major parties and independent candidates, and repeat this exercise for each election held between 1999 and 2009. We find that three-way and five-way partitions of the country adequately capture the main political cleavages in Turkey. Although the conservative right-wing parties receive a plurality of votes in all regions of the three-way partition, they receive significant challenge from left-wing and Turkish nationalist parties in the west and from the Kurdish nationalist parties in the east. In addition to these patterns, the five-way partition brings out shifts in the relative strength of the parties within each main division. Our results also show that, despite the major political realignment that occurred during the period under examination, the groupings of provinces remain mainly unchanged. Therefore, we construct ‘composite clusters’ by classifying provinces in the group in which they appear the majority of the time. The distinct socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of the composite clusters suggest that differences in social and economic structures lie at the root of differing regional political tendencies and their persistence.

Basic Values, Ideological Self-Placement, and Voting: A Cross-Cultural Study

The current study examines the contribution of left–right (or liberal–conservative) ideology to voting, as well as the extent to which basic values account for ideological orientation. Analyses were conducted in 16 countries from five continents (Europe, North America, South America, Asia, and Oceania), most of which have been neglected by previous studies. Results showed that left–right (or liberal–conservative) ideology predicted voting in all countries except Ukraine. Basic values exerted a considerable effect in predicting ideology in most countries, especially in established democracies such as Australia, Finland, Italy, United Kingdom, and Germany. Pattern of relations with the whole set of 10 values revealed that the critical trade-off underlying ideology is between values concerned with tolerance and protection for the welfare of all people (universalism) versus values concerned with preserving the social order and status quo (security). A noteworthy exception was found in European postcommunist countries, where relations of values with ideology were small (Poland) or near to zero (Ukraine, Slovakia).

The Gendered Aspects of MSEs in MENA: Evidence from Egypt and Turkey

This study attempts to shed light on the gendered aspect of MSEs (i.e. how the sectors of activities, income, growth, etc. differ by the gender of the entrepreneur) and tests some of the main claims of the rather modest available literature by means of an econometric analysis. The empirical work utilizes nationally representative MSE surveys conducted for Turkey and Egypt in 2001 and 2003 respectively (for brevity, we hereafter use “E&T” to refer to “Egypt and Turkey”). The working sample has 4136 and 4238 permanent establishments located in the urban areas of Egypt and Turkey, respectively. By identifying the sectors and types of activities females are more likely to thrive in, this study calls attention to those sectors where direct intervention by the government will be more effective, and provide some guidance for making proposals to further reduce the extent of gender-differences and practices in MSEs.

Preference of the unemployed between full-time and part-time jobs

This paper examines the factors that determine the preference of the unemployed between the employment states of part-time, full-time, and either kind of job. Evidence is sought in support of an ordering between the three choices and find that the ordering which places the ‘either’ category in the middle is the most sensible.

Economic Voting in Turkey: Perceptions, Expectations, and the Party Choice

Following a brief summary of macroeconomic developments since 2001 and a review of the economic voting literature in the Turkish context, we examine the effect of economic evaluations on the likelihood of Turkish voters to opt for the currently-ruling Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP). In addition to several socio-demographic characteristics and religiosity, our empirical model – estimated using micro data from a 2014 electoral tendency survey – includes both retrospective and prospective economic voting variables. Binary logit estimates provide strong evidence in favour of the idea that perceptions and expectations regarding the economy have a considerable impact on the party choice, especially when the voter holds the government responsible for the recent changes in economic conditions. Our findings also suggest that as long as the proportion of voters who are satisfied with their economic conditions is reasonably large, the AKP will remain at the centre stage of Turkish politics for at least another term.

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

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.

The Contribution of Religiosity to Ideology: Empirical Evidences From Five Continents:

The current study examines the extent to which religiosity account for ideological orientations in 16 countries from five continents (Australia, Brazil, Chile, Germany, Greece, Finland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Poland, Slovakia, Spain, Turkey, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and the United States). Results showed that religiosity was consistently related to right and conservative ideologies in all countries, except Australia. This relation held across different religions, and did not vary across participant’s demographic conditions (i.e., gender, age, income, and education). After controlling for basic personal values, the contribution of religiosity on ideology was still significant. However, the effect was substantial only in countries where religion has played a prominent role in the public sphere, such as Spain, Poland, Greece, Italy, Slovakia, and Turkey. In the other countries, the unique contribution of religiosity was marginal or small.