Containing the Opposition:
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Selective Representation in Jordan and Turkey
MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE
By
Raffaela Lisette Wakeman
JUL 16 2009
Submitted to the Department of Political Science
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in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Science and Bachelor of Science in Political Science
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology
June 2009
© 2009 Raffaela Wakeman
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The author hereby grants to MIT permission to reproduce and distribute publicly paper and
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hereafter created.
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- arles H. Stewart, III
Professor of Political Science
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Abstract
How does elite manipulation of election mechanisms affect the representation of political
regime opponents? While the spread of elections has reached all the continents, the number of
actual democracies has not increased at a comparable rate. If anything, observers have learned
that the presence of elections in a country does not necessarily mean that it is also a democracy.
This thesis addresses an underexplored topic in the study of electoral politics: the manipulation
of election systems in order to achieve selective representation.
I focus on the experience of opposition parties in two cases, Jordan and Turkey, an
autocracy and a democracy, to analyze the impact of engineered election mechanisms on their
representation. I contend that parties in power exploit the rules of the electoral game to contain
their opposition. This is done by different mechanisms, depending on the makeup of the country
and the options available to the manipulators. Mechanisms of electoral systems are used to
reduce the representation of groups that are considered a threat, and to amplify the representation
of those groups that the regime would like to strengthen. Analyzing the effect of malapportioned
seats and the use of a single non-transferable voting system in Jordan on the Islamic Action Front
Party (IAF), the main political rival to traditional tribal politicians, I expose the power of these
targeted electoral mechanisms for control. Examining how the 10% national election threshold
in Turkey affects representation of the Islamist political parties in the Grand National Assembly
uncovers the distorting effect of this universal mechanism on representation.
I analyze the election results for the 1993, 1997, and 2003 parliamentary elections in
Jordan, measuring malapportionment and the variation in turnout. While the motivations for the
Hashemite regime are to maintain stability and power in their country, I show that there are
unintended consequences for this manipulation through an analysis of turnout and a policy study
of honor crimes, the cause of the majority of Jordanian women's deaths every year.
I examine Turkey's elections since 1961, calculating the difference between vote share
and seat share, which uncovers an increase in the disparity between votes and seats since the
installation of the election threshold. I conduct a counterfactual analysis, using a set of districts
and reallocating the seats in each district using a 5% national election threshold instead of the
current 10% threshold. Even by lowering the threshold this much, there is a much more equal
representation of votes in the parliament.
Electoral systems are engineered to suit the country in question. While the characteristics
of states and election mechanisms used in each country are without a doubt different and specific
to each case, the concept of representation is universal to all systems. In both Jordan and Turkey,
the end goal of containing the opposition has not necessarily been reached: the Hashemite regime
and its tribal loyalists don't see eye to eye on all issues, while in Turkey the AKP, a conservative
Islamist political party, has overcome the obstacles to become the beneficiary of the threshold.
Table of Contents
Abstract
3
Figures
5
Tables
6
1. Engineering the Opposition Out
7
2. Universal and Targeted Mechanisms for Control
16
3. A Model for Authoritarians: Votes without Seats
42
4. Targeted Control of Islamists: Jordan and Malapportionment
58
5. Turkey's Struggle With Democracy
86
5. Universal Control in Turkey: The Election Threshold
109
7. The Implications of Manipulation
140
8. Containing the Opposition
152
Appendix A
158
Appendix B
161
Appendix C
164
Works Cited
166
Figures
3-1: Govemorates of Jordan
42
4-1: Malapportionment in Jordan
66
4-2: Population Size and Malapportionment
67
4-3: 1993 and 2003 Malapportionment and IAF Success
72
4-4: Aggregate IAF success as a function of Malapportionment
74
4-5: Population and IAF Success
76
4-6: 1993- 2003 Malapportionment and 2007 IAF results
80
4-7: Malapportionment and Turnout in Jordan's elections
81
4-8: Participation and proportion of Jordan's Population
82
4-9: Causal Relationship of Targeted Mechanisms
84
5-1: Turkey's Administrative Divisions
101
5-2: Evolution of Turkish Parties
104
6-1: Islamist Parties' Province-level Results
117
6-2: District-level seat-vote disproportionality for the Islamist party
120
6-3: From Votes to Seats: 1973-2007
124
6-4: Vote-Seat shares for winning parties
127
6-5: 1961-1977 Vote and Seat Share for Select Districts, T=O
132
6-6: 10% Threshold- 1983-2007
134
6-7: 1983-2007 Results with 5% Election Threshold
135
6-8: 5% Threshold with trimmed results
136
Tables
2-1: Fitting Characteristics of Democratic Systems to Jordan and Turkey
35
3-1: The Evolution of Jordan's Electoral System
52
3-2: Distribution of Seats by Governorate, 2003-present
53
4-1: Mean Vote Share for Winners
61
4-2: Vote Distribution for Winners: By Governorate
62
4-3: Governorate malapportionment and population distribution
65
4-4: Variables in Analysis for Jordan
68
4-5: Regression Analysis of Population and Malapportionment
69
4-6: Quotas and Minorities in Jordan
70
4-7: IAF Seats and Malapportionment
75
4-8: Population Regression Analysis
77
4-9: Multivariate regression analysis on IAF success
78
4-10: Explaining the Variation in Turnout
83
5-1: Constitutional Court Design across democracies
98
5-2: Turkey's Political Parties
103
5-3: Evolution of the Turkish Electoral System
106
5-4: Islamist Performance, 1973-2007
108
6-1: The Turkish Electoral System since 1961: Institutionalized Repression
113
6-2: Nationwide Disproportionality in Turkey's Elections
115
6-3: Islamist party election results in select provinces
119
6-4: Islamist Party Results Based on District Size
122
6-5: D'Hondt Method: Kayseri 1995
130
6-6: Representation in Select Districts in Turkey
138
7-1: Number of Parties in the Grand National Assembly
149
B-1: The 1993 House of Deputies Election- Turnout and Malapportionment
161
B-2: The 1997 House of Deputies Election- Turnout and Malapportionment
162
B-3: The 2003 House of Deputies Election- Turnout and Malapportionment
163
C-1: Turkey 1961-1977 Elections
164
B-2: Turkey 1983-2007 Elections
165
Chapter 1
Engineering the Opposition Out
How does elite manipulation of election mechanisms affect the representation of political
regime opponents? This thesis addresses an underexplored topic in the study of electoral politics:
the manipulation of election systems in order to achieve selective representation.
Although multitudes of questions about elections have been answered by equally
numerous studies of electoral systems, a new set of issues has yet to be addressed due to the
"third wave" of democratization and the resulting diffusion of elections across the globe; from
elections in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein to South Africans going to the ballot box, to the
King of Morocco incorporating popularly elected legislatures into his government, voting has
become almost as ubiquitous as Coca-Cola or McDonalds (Huntington 1991). While the spread
of elections has reached all the continents, however, the number of actual democracies has not
increased at a comparable rate. Some leaders new to elections have exploited the iconic image of
"Election Day" to meet their particular needs (i.e. to stay in power), and others have simply
ignored the process while simultaneously endorsing their elections as "free and fair." If anything,
observers have learned from this "third wave" that the presence of does not necessarily mean that
it is also a democracy. Indeed, several leaders have taken advantage of some electoral
mechanisms to maintain their power or simply to prevent their opponents from ever gaining
government representation. While these issues have arisen recently, few, if any of them, have
been addressed. In addition, the typical measures by which to judge an electoral system do not
necessarily fit these unconventional systems. Whereas many established democracies were
popular movements for representative government, in many cases these newcomers are
approaching the process from the top down.
Over all, the world has welcomed the advent of elections to these countries. Justifying the
means by the ends has been the general rule of thumb for the states providing economic aid,
military support, and legitimacy to these governments. Individual cases, however, of
malapportionment or vote buying, just two of the many methods available, have contaminated
the pristine picture of elections we have in our minds.
Another trend related to the onset of "third wave" elections is the rise of a different type
of politics. Whether they are religious, cult-like, or separatist, these new political organizations
pose unfamiliar threats to the governments in power. Some scholars point to these approaches to
politics as the catalyst behind electoral engineering in the first place, while others contend that by
including these groups in policymaking, their positions will moderate, essentially removing the
necessity for electoral manipulation.
Recently, Islamist political parties have been gaining public attention in both Jordan and
Turkey: the AKP, or Justice and Development Party has controlled a super majority of seats in
the 550-seat Turkish Grand National Assembly since 2002, reducing the other parties in Turkey
to minority status, while the Jordanian Islamic Action Front Party has experienced a significant
decline in its seat share in the House of Deputies. In Turkey, the AKP was brought to the
Constitutional Court in the summer of 2008, and just barely escaped being banned from politics.
In Jordan, the IAF attributes its recent losses to the electoral system: a single non transferable
vote system (or SNTV), in which voters in multimember districts are only given one vote,
combined with system-wide malapportionment caused their defeat in the 2007 elections.
This study addresses the experience of opposition parties in these two cases, an autocracy
and a democracy, to analyze the effect of engineered election mechanisms on their
representation. How representative is Jordan's House of Deputies? Besides the absence of the
"one person, one vote" principle (despite assurances from the monarchy that their system does
fulfill this principle), does this mechanism have additional effects on elections? What about
Turkey- how much is the abnormally high threshold influencing representation? Are these
mechanisms deliberately built into the system to contain the regimes' rivals?
Both Turkey and Jordan are dependent on their American and European allies for
military support and economic support. For Jordan, its close relationship with the West has
pressured the ruling Hashemite monarchy to reinstitute elections; while from the outside these
elections appear to be "democratic," the mechanisms in place work to repress citizens' votes. In
fact, the only election results that are ever made public are the winning candidates' vote shares
and turnout.
For Turkey, its relationship to the West has another dimension: Turkey is a member of
the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development (OECD), and is currently in negotiations to become a full member of the European
Union (EU). Turkey's human rights record, conflict with the separatist Kurds, and repeated
election interference by unelected government officials are all issues that must be resolved
before its membership in the EU is finalized. Statements from the EU regarding a future Turkish
membership cite the abnormally high election threshold as another source of controversy.
Argument
This study argues that parties in power exploit the rules of the electoral game to contain
their opposition. This is done by exploiting different mechanisms, depending on the makeup of
the country and the options available to the manipulators. Mechanisms of electoral systems are
used to reduce the representation of groups that are considered a threat, and to amplify the
representation of those groups that the regime would like to strengthen.
In the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, for instance, while there have been both
reapportionment and election law reform recently, critics claim that these changes are being
made to maintain the status quo, not to enhance democracy. Jordan is not technically considered
one of the "third wave" countries, but the recent return of elections provides a strong basis for
questioning the merits of its electoral system. Widespread malapportionment in Jordan,
especially the drastic underrepresentation of the most densely populated regions of the country,
profoundly distorts the people's voice. The SNTV system also compromises the level of
representation by limiting voters to one vote, despite their district being represented by several
MPs. This misrepresentation has reverberating effects throughout the system. Focusing on
Election Day effects, the underrepresented districts turn out to vote at much lower rates than in
the overrepresented regions. Through the policy analysis of honor crimes, I also speculate on the
relationship between malapportionment and the refusal of the House of Deputies to increase the
penalty for committing an honor killing.
In some more established democracies, elections have existed for quite some time, but
with meddling by unelected officials. Turkey's experience with popularly elected legislatures is
almost a century long, but the frequent intervention by non-elected officers (whether it be the
military establishment through military coups or the Constitutional Court with political party
bans) has also raised questions as to what "free and fair" actually means in Turkey. Turkey's
long history with elections places it out of the category of "third wave" countries, but frequent
interventions by unelected political elites and an exceptionally high national election threshold
place large barriers to political parties seeking seats in the Grand National Assembly. By
requiring parties to win the 10% of the votes, Turkey's system keeps smaller parties out of the
government. I discuss the strength of these mechanisms in advancing the political agenda of the
regime.
Case Selection: Jordan and Turkey
Turkey and Jordan were chosen as the case studies for this research for several reasons.
In both countries, the regime has used strict definitions of nationalism to create a specific
national identity for its citizens- while permitting all of its inhabitants, regardless of ethnicity or
religion, to become citizens, even separatist ethnic groups (in Turkey the Kurds are in this
position, while in Jordan it is the Palestinians), the regime represses expression of alternative
identities. In addition, both countries are in the midst of a debate over the role of Islam in
politics.
In Turkey, the ruling AKP has roots in previous banned Islamic political parties, and was
almost the target of another Constitutional Court banning in 2008. In Jordan, the Islamic Action
Front has suffered declining seat shares in the House of Deputies since its formation. In both
countries, however, there is little danger of domestic religious terrorism and internal threats,
despite Muslim majority populations, proximity to other conflicts, and close relationships with
Western countries and Israel. Turkey and Jordan are also unique in that religious-oriented
political parties are permitted to take part in elections, unique to countries with electoral systems,
as the separation of church and state frequently steers modern states' courses towards
democracy.
There are a number of differences between these two countries that should also be
discussed. Jordan is a constitutional monarchy, with ultimate power vested in the King and the
council of ministers (who are all appointed by the king). Jordan can best be characterized as an
authoritarian regime transitioning to democracy. Turkey, on the other hand, is a constitutional
republic, with strict separation of powers and a long history with democratically elected
governments. Jordan is an Arab Muslim-majority country, while Turkey is a state without an
Arab-majority (but the majority of Turks are Muslim). The electoral systems in Jordan and
Turkey are also quite different: Turkey has a party-list proportional representation (PR) with
multi-member electoral districts, while Jordan uses a single non transferable voting (SNTV)
system, in which voters can vote for one candidate to represent them in multi member districts.
Turkey has a history of political parties, and Jordanians do not generally affiliate with political
parties; instead, Jordanians tend to vote for a tribal or familial candidate. The mechanisms for
control are different as well, targeting specific stages in the election process, but ultimately end
up affection the representation of votes.
Plan
This research will examine the effect of electoral mechanisms on representation in Jordan
and Turkey. In Chapter 2, I discuss the theory and relevant literature regarding Jordan's
liberalization path, Turkey's electoral politics, general democratization and election systems. I
focus on features of electoral systems, including malapportionment (deliberately allocating
government representation that are not distributed according to population) and election
thresholds (a minimum vote requirement that political parties must reach in order to win any
seats in the legislature). I probe the variation in electoral systems, and discuss majority-rule two
party systems and proportional representation systems (PR). PR systems are organized in two
forms: either voters choose their preferred party, and all party candidates are arranged in a list, or
individual candidates run in each election (supported typically by a party), and voters select their
preferred candidate. Single non-transferable voting systems fit fully under neither majoritarian
nor consensual systems: voters can vote for one candidate despite the fact that the districts have
multiple representatives.
I examine the literature on regimes transitioning to democracy, the role of unelected
officials in elections, and the effects of electoral reform on party systems. Are there visible
consequences of installing these mechanisms into election systems? One of the motivations
behind pursuing integrating electoral systems into governments, at least in the cases of Jordan
and Turkey, is to continue receiving aid from their powerful Western allies. The domestic
pressures on both governments, especially policies regarding the activity of ethnic minorities and
religious political parties, seem to be pushing the regime toward manipulation.
In Chapter 3 I provide historical sketches of Jordan. In Jordan, the concept of defensive
democratization, best articulated by Robinson (1999), characterizes the method of governance
exercised by the Hashemite regime. Much of Jordan's domestic policy is heavily influenced by
the Arab-Israeli conflict and the status of Palestinians in the West Bank. Jordan's past experience
with elections and its relationship with the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood and its political arm,
the Islamic Action Front, provide perspectives on reasoning behind the current electoral system.
In Chapter 4, I analyze Jordan's electoral results from 1993, 1997, and 2003. Despite the
severe data limitations, there are significant findings on the variation in turnout as well as
evidence to explain the declining success of the Islamic Action Front, the main Islamist political
party in Jordan. Jordan's malapportionment not only skews the balance of power in the House of
Deputies from the most populous districts to the strongest traditional rural allies, but also impacts
the rate at which citizens turn out on Election Day.
Chapter 5 discusses the evolution of Turkey's electoral system and relevant history.
Turkey's history with popularly elected governments reaches back almost to its independence in
1923, but this lengthy experience is slightly misleading: several interventions by the military as
well as party bans by the Constitutional Court prevent Turkey from being a full-fledged
democracy. Turkey's secular, centralized outlook on government and nationalism has resulted in
repression of organized movements for ethnic or religious identity.
In Chapter 6, I study Turkey's elections from 1961 to 2007. The large amount of data
allow me to analyze the evolution of Turkey's electoral system, with a special focus on the
effects of the 10% national election threshold used since 1983. The 10% election threshold poses
a very high barrier to entrance into government. There is a great deal of variation on district
magnitude (DM), with districts with as few as three representatives to as many as sixty. By
aggregating results from 1961 to 2007, I show that the Grand National Assembly today is much
less representative of voters' preferences than before the threshold was imposed. I study the
results in several districts specifically to illustrate the impact of the threshold with a stronger
lens. I also propose a counterfactual analysis in Turkey: by lowering the national threshold to
5%, how would representation in the Grand National Assembly been different?
In Chapter 7, I discuss the effect of the electoral system mechanisms on both countries: in
Jordan, the legal and social problems created by its incredibly high rate of honor crimes place
both the regime and elected politicians in quite surprising positions. Honor crimes, or the killing
of a family member (usually a woman) for bringing shame upon the family's name, are prevalent
in Jordan. These crimes receive lesser punishments in many several countries (and are not
limited to Muslim countries). In 2004, King Abdallah II and the upper house of parliament
proposed changes to its laws, in an attempt to increase punishment of honor killings to be
comparable to other forms of murder. When the law was brought to the House of Deputies,
however, it was voted down. As the roll call vote for this and other legislation is unavailable, I
review the arguments on either side of this debate, and speculate as to whom voted against the
bills. In Turkey, the universality of the election threshold as a mechanism has resulted in the rise
to power of military opponents. The AKP's popularity and success at the polls served to help the
party overcome the barrier posed by the election threshold and win large pluralities in the last
two elections.
I conclude my research in Chapter 8 with a summary of my findings and discussion on
the implication of my research. The approach taken in this project can be extended to other
countries, and research on Turkey can now be focused on examining the effects of these
mechanisms on legislation and law. The status of Jordan's 'democratization' can now be put into
perspective. The experience of each country demonstrates that despite a regime's efforts to
maintain the control over election results, with the proper support from the public, the opposition
can overcome and in some cases, reap the rewards of these mechanisms to the detriment of the
ruling regime.
Chapter 2
Universal and Targeted Mechanisms for Control
Politics in Turkey and Jordan have generated a great deal of research and discussion. A
prominent approach is postulating on the impact of politics and elections on ethnic out-groups in
each country- the Palestinians and Kurds. Because of the governments' refusal to report the
ethnic makeup of their countries, however, it is difficult to make more than suppositions on this
subject. A large focus in both countries is on the role of Islamist political parties and leaders in
government and policymaking. In Jordan the power assigned to these leaders has been limited,
so scholars have instead focused on the evolution and internal functions of Islamist political
parties there. A frequent angle in discussions of Turkey's experience with Islamist parties is
studying the reaction of the military and Constitutional Court to them.
The role of the "clash of civilizations" has produced a new body of research focused on
cultural "exceptionalism," the idea that certain groups are resistant to adopting democracy in
their countries. While many state the problems of the Turkish and Jordanian electoral systems in
passing, there is still a remaining question: how have the mechanisms in each system affected
representation in each country's legislature?
In this chapter, I discuss the literature related to Jordan's democratization and Turkey's
electoral politics. Then I review electoral system design, electoral engineering and the systems
in Jordan and Turkey. I discuss the concept of representation and propose hypotheses for each
country on the effects of specific electoral mechanisms on representation of its citizens.
The CurrentFocus: Ethnic Minorities andIslamists
Scholars have approached the study of election reform in Jordan from several angles:
examining the effect of malapportionment on the Palestinian population, conducting historical
analyses of Islamic political parties, studying the role of political parties in the political system,
and speculating on the motivation for electoral reform. A frequently discussed controversy
regarding democratization in Jordan is that although Palestinians are offered full citizenship with
voting rights, they are underrepresented in the Parliament as well as in the rest of the state
machinery (Lust-Okar 2007). While the Hashemite government will not release the official
population breakdown of Palestinians and Jordanians, many explain the underrepresentation of
urban areas like Amman and Zarqa by pointing out the large concentration of Palestinians there.
The history of elections in Turkey is plagued with interventions by the military and
unelected Constitutional Courts. This interference with democracy poses a threat to Turkey's
EU bid. The recent failure of the Constitutional Court to ban the ruling AKP and the persistence
of Prime Minister Erdogan in standing up to military threats indicate at least a temporary change
of course. In this section, I also discuss previous approaches to the study of Turkey's elections,
and note the gaps in the literature on this topic.
Elections and democracy in Turkey have been approached in several ways. Scholars
have considered Turkey's Muslim heritage and the presence of democracy as a sign that it is an
exception to the rule of the incompatibility of these two ideas. Another dimension of analysis has
been to measure the effect of Turkey's elections on the Kurds; examining voting patterns has,
however, been difficult, as Turkey does not collect ethnic or religious data in its censuses.
Finally, academics have also studied the intersection of Muslim law and Turkish politics by
examining Constitutional Court decisions and political debates related to religious practice.
Muslim/Arab/CulturalExceptionalism
Overshadowing a great deal of work on elections in developing and young democracies is
the theory of "exceptionalism:" the idea that certain cultures and religions are especially resistant
to democratic governance. Stepan and Robertson (2003) first examine electoral competition
(using Polity IV, Freedom House scores and GDP) across Muslim-majority countries, finding
that non-Arab Muslim states have been more electorally competitive that Arab Muslim states.
While they are hesitant to equate electoral competitiveness with democracy, their evidence
seems to revise the theory of Muslim exceptionalism to be include only Arab countries. One
significant point that takes away from their conclusion is that many of these states are either
developing countries (Jordan, Libya, Morocco), or significant allies of Western countries (Egypt,
Saudi Arabia, Kuwait). Developing countries are, regardless of ethnic or religious composition,
overall less "free" and electorally competitive than developed countries. The other classification
of many of these countries, U.S. allies, may be at lower levels of freedom and democracy than
others because U.S. support and aid is keeping the authoritarian regime in power.
To provide further justification for the use of Arab exceptionalism over Muslim
exceptionalism, Angrist (2004) examines the number of parties, the level of polarization, and the
presence (or absence) of mobilization asymmetry across Muslim countries to explain the
presence of competitive political institutions in Turkey. Although the newly independent
Turkish state started out on its democratization path at the same time and under similar outer
conditions as other Muslim countries, the establishment of a two party system instead of a single
or multi party system and the lack of occupying power (after the Ottoman Empire collapsed)
were the determining factors in explaining Turkey's successful path to democracy (Angrist
2004). Ultimately Turkey adopted a PR system, which resulted in the creation of a multi party
system and depolarization of politics.
Ghalioun (2004) and Lakoff (2004) debate the theory of Arab exceptionalism (and
specifically the results from Stepan and Robertson (2003)), with Ghalioun turning the focus to
the persistence of authoritarianism in Arab countries. Lakoff (2004) counters Stepan and
Robertson's (2003) analyses: Lakoff (2004) finds that using GDP and electoral competitiveness
ignores the abundance of cases of undemocratic non-Arab Muslim majority countries of Central
Asia (the "stans," as he refers to them) and Iran. In a later paper, Stepan and Robertson (2004)
discuss the lack of well-developed responses to those arguments. Harik (2006) counters the
theory generated by Freedom House studies of Arab and Muslim countries finding that they are
exceptionally resistant to democracy. Harik (2006) finds that the measurement scale has been
improperly applied to developing countries, which include many Arab and Muslim countries,
and that the finding of "exceptionalism" is based on misinterpretations of fact and misuse of the
Freedom House scale.
Inglehart and Norris (2003) examine public opinion data from Muslim countries,
suggesting that the "cultural fault line that divides the West and the Muslim World" is related to
sex, not democracy. While Muslims around the world support democracy as much as
Westerners, they do not hold the same attitudes about marriage, women's rights, and sexual
freedom as Americans (Inglehart and Norris 2003). While the disparity between Western and
Muslim public opinion on these topics is quite large, I hesitate to say that Westerners hold
remarkably different views about marriage, gender equality and sexuality from Muslims:
abortion, for example, is a highly controversial topic in the Western world (only 48% believe
that it can always be justified) as well as in the Muslim world (25% believe that abortion can
always be justified). The presence of a large disparity in public opinion does not necessarily
mean that there is a "clash of civilizations," as Inglehart and Norris (2003) contend.
Mazrui (2004) traces the history of the relationship between the United States and
Muslim countries, organizing them into four phases. The post-9/11 phase is characterized by the
exploitation of fear by the Bush administration to wage the war on terrorism. He notes that
despite the administration's contentions that the war is not on Islam, it has been Muslims who've
paid the price for Al Qaeda's actions, which has strained U.S. relations with Muslim countries
(Mazrui 2004).
Volpi (2004) examines the institutional mechanisms in Muslim countries that are
preventing full democratization. He shies away from the traditional binary classification of
democracies and autocracies, and promotes a third middle ground of pseudo-democratic regimes
using the struggle between liberalism, republicanism, and Islamism in these countries as a basis
for his categorization. Volpi (2004) notes that Western conceptions of democracy coincide with
liberal practices and norms, which conflict with the state of policies and opinions in the Muslim
world, which tend to be more conservative and less progressive (at least with regards to civil
liberties and women's rights). He criticizes the requirement that democracies must produce
liberal policies.
With regard to republicanism, Volpi (2004) criticizes the application of it to Muslim
countries, suggesting that civil society and group dynamics in the Muslim world have a view of
republicanism distinct from the Western model, combining the principles of republicanism with
what he calls asabiyya, an organizational system centered around tribes and communities rather
than political parties. Former asabiyya models were used as the bases for a monarchic system,
whereas the new model aims to legitimate limited democratic rule because it supports nationalist
and economic development agendas (Volpi 2004).
A serious issue in the study of Jordan's politics is that it continuously refers to the lack of
political parties as a reason for the faux democratization Robinson (1997), Schwedler (1998) and
other point out. In addition, Lust-Okar (2007) and others treat the Islamic Action Front as a
powerful player in Jordanian politics, simply because it is the only formal political organization
(at least according to Western standards) to win seats in the House of Deputies. As appealing
explanations as these may be, they do not accurately explain politics in Jordan. Jordanians vote
for candidates based upon the candidates' mutual affiliation with a tribe or other social
organization. Consistently, however, scholars point to the failure of the election of the
"opposition" to be a prime reason why Jordan's liberalization path is inadequate (Ryan 1998).
There have been numerous political parties competing in Jordan's elections, but few have
succeeded in winning seats in the House of Deputies. The only political party to consistently win
multiple seats in elections is the Islamic Action Front Party.
What is often overlooked is that Jordanians themselves either do not know or are not
concerned about the success of political parties (CSS Public Opinion Survey 2006). Indeed,
polling data indicates that the most representative political party was the Islamic Action Front,
which 4.2% of respondents chose as representative. When asked which of the current political
parties in Jordan were qualified to form a government, 90.4% of the respondents said "none."
The majority of respondents (65.8%) consider a political party to be "a political organization that
seeks to participate in the political process without assuming power." If Jordanians do not even
see political parties as central players in politics, how can they be expected to form them or join
them? Jordanians largely do not recognize the names of political parties: 47.4% knew the name
of the Islamic Action Front and 25.1% recognized the National Constitutional Party. Jordanian
political parties clearly have failed to reach out to citizens to garner support. For this reason,
Volpi's (2004) model fits the political space in Jordan much better than the political party system
organization suggested by others.
Volpi's (2004) modification of the democracy-authoritarianism spectrum to include a
middle ground status provides space to consider democratizing Muslim countries separately, not
quite at a state of established democracy like Turkey, and yet not truly in the "authoritarian"
category either. While in Western democracies the concept of separation of church and state
plays a major role in understanding the concept of representative government, it is not
necessarily the case in Muslim countries.
While Angrist's (2004) argument explains Turkey's early history, it virtually ignores the
fact that the military has frequently intervened in the political process and frozen representative
government for years at a time. An outstanding question on Turkey's seemingly unusual status
is how the regime's emphasis since independence has been on the strict separation of religion
and politics. Religion-oriented parties are banned, and religious expression is virtually banned in
public. Perhaps Turkey's legacy as a secular government, with a Muslim identity that is
secondary its national identity, plays a stronger role than the literature is willing to suggest.
Islamistpoliticalparties
Questions surrounding the recent participation in both countries by religion-oriented
political organizations have resulted in research on the intersection between Islam and politics. In
Turkey, the Constitutional Court has stepped in frequently to remove religious parties from
politics until very recently, with the rise of the Justice and Development (AKP) Party, a
conservative, Islamist political party. In Jordan, the decreasing popularity of the Islamic Action
Front Party have raised questions as to the fairness of Jordan's apportionment and the goals of
the IAF.
In her study of the history of Jordanian political parties, Lust-Okar (2001) examines the
political party system through two lenses: party strength and party-system strengths. She points
to the Islamic Action Front as the "single strongest party in the kingdom." This statement,
however, is misleading: political parties in Jordan garner very little power or popularity in the
political system: the power rests in the regime-loyalists and ultimately the regime itself.
Independent candidates win the majority of the seats in the House of Deputies (84.6% in the
2003 elections). Tribal constituencies usually support these independent candidates. Lust-Okar
(2001) also postulates that candidates in Jordan do not fight for power, but instead for patronage
of the Hashemites.
In studying Islamists and/or political parties, scholars assume that the state and Islamist
groups are not only two separate entities, but also that they have two choices in dealing with each
other: cooperation or conflict. The relationship between political organizations and the state
tends to be examined on a continuum; this is also the case for the study of Islamist parties.
Langohr (2001) proposes a third option: that Islamists have, as well-educated citizens, been
successful in placing themselves in government positions which then allow them to better pursue
their agenda. This consideration helps understand why Islamist movements decide to pursue
more moderate political agendas and stances when included in politics (Langohr 2001).
Indeed, Schwedler (1998) finds that Islamist parties are not scheming to take over their
governments, but instead as they are forced to work in a pluralist system, their positions actually
moderate. "The real question is not whether Islamists pose a threat, but what political agendas
are served by continuing to paint Islamists as a monolithic, antidemocratic mob" (Schwedler
1998). She also criticizes others for ignoring the regimes that are manipulating the outcomes of
elections and instead focusing on the Islamists (Schwedler 1998). Robinson (1997) points out
that the inclusion of Islamists in the political process in Jordan led to the "creation of an
integrated, establishment-oriented and moderate Islamist movement. Jordan's Islamists have
proved themselves to be capable democrats, obeying the rules of the political game while
parlaying their strength in society into a parliamentary plurality." Lust-Okar (2001) sees
international forces as a reason for the strengthening of Islamist parties in Jordan (and throughout
the region).
Ahmad (1988) discusses the Turkish regime's reactions to perceived Islamic threats after
the 1980 military coup. He finds that the number of cases brought to court and persons
implicated rose greatly between 1984 and 1987. He notes that 70% of these cases were
dismissed, but warns that these trends are signs of the "reassertion of its Islamic identity"
(Ahmad 1988). He traces Islamic politics throughout Turkey's history, finding it peaked in
popularity in the 1970s, with parties across the political spectrum infusing their platforms with
pro-Islamic rhetoric and the creation of explicitly Islamic political parties (although he points out
that the Islamic MSP did not succeed in winning many seats in those elections) (Ahmad 1988).
Ahmad (1988) presents his findings to predict the future of Islamic politics after the 1987
elections, finding that it was on the downturn, which turned out to be an inaccurate prediction.
Ahmad's (1988) study provides indications of the perception of the Islamic threat to the military
and centrist-wings of Turkish politics through the 1980s. His study, however, does not provide
an understanding of the public's feelings towards these Islamic "threats;" if in future elections
support for Islam-oriented parties improves, does the inclusion of fairly elected Islamic parties
translate into a threat to Turkey's stability?
Giilalp (1995) traces the history of the Islamic RP, the ruling party at the time. He
discusses their views on politics and the economy, including policies with regard to the Kurdish
population and Constitutional reform. He finds that since the Kurds are not allowed to organize
politically, that the RP was the party they would most likely support (Giilalp 1995). His article
outlines the success of the RP, and finds that the source of its success was public support for
change, but does not delve into the influence of electoral mechanisms. Similarly, Yavuz (1997)
also examines the 1995 election results, and the roots of the RP's successful campaign. He
identifies the strict secularism inherent in Kemal's vision of the Turkish state and contends that
originally, "secular" was intended to unite the diverse ethnic and religious groups in Turkey, but
today "secularism" is interpreted to mean the absence of religion in politics.
Neither Yavuz (1997) nor Giilalp (1995) study the electoral mechanisms that might have
influenced the RP's results in 1995. Instead, they find that these results are indicative of a shift in
the Turkish public's opinion regarding the intersection of religion and politics. Mecham (2004)
examines the 2002 elections and the AKP's rise to power in a similar way. He determines the
institutional factors that led to the rise of an Islamic political party to power in the secular
Turkish state. He points to three changes: greater freedom in political organization, which has
led to the introduction of greater diversity of political ideology, the imposition of constraints on
civil life on the Islamist movement, more interaction between Islamist politicians, constituencies
and the state leading to greater information sharing and greater appeal for Islamist politics
(Mecham 2004). In discussing the election results for Islamist parties, Mecham's (2004) analysis
notes the improvement in election returns between 1999 and 2002, but does not go further than a
top-level analysis.
Previous research on Turkey and Jordan has emphasized the evolution of Islamic politics,
and governmental policies regarding Kurds and Palestinians. Some scholars have found that
including Islamist political parties in government moderates their platforms, in addition to
postulating on the effect of laws and various aspects of the electoral system on Islamist parties.
In this light, examining approaches to the study of electoral reform could be a useful tool for
studying how regimes themselves manipulate the law in their favor. Posusney also calls for a
scholarly effort in examining the mechanisms of electoral manipulation by regimes like those in
Jordan (Posusney 1998).
Although Schwedler's work focuses on reactions to reforms in civil rights, inclusion of
her work in the body of knowledge surrounding Islamist reactions to regime oppression is
important. She looked at the reaction of Islamic political parties to government, specifically
through public demonstrations and boycotts (Schwedler 2003). She points to the Hashemite
regime's restrictions on publications and the press in 1997 as well as the 1993 elections law as
the motivation for the IAF's boycott of elections that year. While the temporary law suspending
these freedoms was found unconstitutional by the Higher Court of Justice in 1998, the absence of
opposition members in the Parliament as a result of their boycott allowed amendments that were
even more restrictive than those previously found unconstitutional. Studies like Schwedler's
(2003) implicitly show that the inclusion of Islamists in the political process could force both the
regime-loyalists and the radicals to moderate their positions.
Other scholars afford the Hashemites a more mild treatment by focusing on the efforts of
the regime to maintain a liberal atmosphere, and build an institutionalized democratic structure
(Abu Jaber 2003). He also points out that the Hashemites emphasized steady change over a rapid
switch from authoritarianism to liberal democracy, which allows the Islamists parties to
participate in democracy (Abu Jaber 2003). Abu Jaber (2003) criticizes the Western criteria that
are used on Muslim countries to determine the level of democratization, much like Harik (2006)
and Tessler (2005). He claims that Jordan's democratization has stood out among Arab countries
because of its non-violent, liberal style (Abu Jaber 2003). The Islamist movement has been
permitted to exist continuously, even during the ban on political parties. He also points to
opposition candidates' entrance into elections as a sign that Jordan is unique in its approach to
democratization.
According to Khoury (1981), there has been a history of Hashemite regime oppression of
political opposition. The National Consultative Council, the predecessor to the Parliament, was a
prime example of the regime's efforts to silence debate and prevent the opposition from
acquiring power. As it was a council appointed by King Hussein, the only powers it held were
the ability to debate and to recommend the regime certain actions (Khoury 1981).
Lucas (2003), much like Khoury (1981) and Libdeh (2005), is pessimistic about the
prospects for deliberalization in Jordan. He explains the change in tracks from deliberalization
back to liberalization: when it is profitable for the regime to pursue democratization (i.e. when
loyalists are in power in the legislature) and when it refers back to deliberalization (i.e., when the
opposition is threatening the loyalists' hold on the legislature). By approaching the regime's
strategies in this way, he tends to ignore the pace at which liberalization is pursued, which is
considered to be an important factor in democratization in authoritarian countries. Because, as
Taagepera and Shugart (1989) point out, exploiting electoral systems is the easiest way for a
regime to manipulate policy, this disagreement about the regime's willingness to allow
opposition politicians to take part in political discourse will be important.
Yegim Arat (1998) examines the effect of women on Turkish politics between the late
1980s and the end of the twentieth century, finding greater emphasis on equal rights. She warns,
however, that the inheritance of a patriarchal system from the Islamic tradition prevents Turkish
feminists from making greater progress in their struggle (Arat 1998). She divides women in
politics into two groups: those who organized against domestic violence (feminists) and those
who joined the Islamist movement. The feminists fought for equal rights based on the Turkish
constitution, while Muslim women fought against the secular foundation of the Turkish state to
be permitted to identify themselves as Muslim (through the use of headscarves, for example).
Both groups' successes were fairly limited, and Arat (1998) does not predict the future of
women's rights in Turkey, but instead examines these groups from a historical point of view.
Hussain Haqqani (2003) examines the impact of the current war in Iraq on Turkey,
Pakistan, and Indonesia, three non-Arab Muslim-majority states. Turkish opposition to the war
has two foundations: Islamic solidarity against the U.S. and fears of Turkish Kurds demands
growing in response to a federal Iraq. He warns that U.S. failure could lead to pressure on Prime
Minister Erdogan to pursue more Islamist policies (which could lead to another military
intervention in Turkey's democracy) (Haqqani 2003).
Several studies note Turkey's 10% threshold as a significant barrier to gaining
representation in the Grand National Assembly (see Cosar and Ozman 2004, Yavus 1997, Bacik
2004), but do not take the next step in examining the effect of this threshold on representation
levels. Esmer and Sayari calculate vote-seat disproportionality with a variety of different
formulas, but only use the results for parties successful in winning seats to perform their
calculations (Esmer and Sayari 2002).
The study of political reform in Jordan focuses on several areas: the impact of reform and
elections on the Palestinian population, the Hashemite motivations of democratization and
electoral reform, and the role of political parties in Jordan. Oftentimes in these studies, scholars
overstate the role of political parties in Jordanian politics- it is the tribes, not the political parties,
who garner the strength and power in the system. In addition, it is difficult to speculate on the
motivations of the Hashemite regime in pursuing political reform. Scholars spend much of their
time predicting the motivations of political elites, which is difficult, while the study of the effect
of electoral reform in Jordan is under explored. Indeed, an in-depth study on the effect of
electoral reform, a truly measurable variable, would provide insight into not only the dynamics
of electoral reform in Jordan specifically, but would also indicate trends in democratization in
authoritarian regimes.
In many established democracies, systematic studies of the transformation of votes into
seats, whether by examining apportionment (the distribution of all seats) or proportionality
(votes for parties translating into representation), have led to more in-depth research on median
voter theory, the impact of citizen opinion on bills and legislators' votes, and general legislature
functionality. In Jordan's case, however, a systematic analysis of malapportionment does not
exist, and severe data limitations prevent these more specific studies. For example, there is no
public record of the roll call vote of members of the House of Deputies, on any issue. For
Turkey, on the other hand, individual studies on specific elections and issues, citizen vote choice,
as well as the rise of Islamist parties, have dominated the study of Turkey's elections.
By examining the individual experiences of electoral reform in Turkey and Jordan, this
study provides important case studies on the effects of specific election mechanisms. A great
deal of past work on electoral systems is multiple country studies to compare and contrast broad
questions of electoral design. What is lacking is explaining how votes are mechanically
converted into seats (or not), especially in cases where there is direct manipulation. With these
two case studies specifically, the literature widely acknowledges the effect of mechanisms for
control, but to my knowledge does not examine their effects on representation.
Representation-The Missing Story
The literature surrounding Jordan's electoral reform seems to be silent on two specific
areas: explanation of the variation in turnout rates in the rural and urban areas and an analysis of
representation. Lust-Okar (2007), Posusney (1998) and others claim that the Jordanian system
does not produce a representative legislature, but their efforts have been limited to focusing on
Jordan's shortcomings with respect to its Palestinian population. In addition, Lust-Okar (2007,
2001), Langohr (2001), Schwedler (1998), and Robinson (1997) discuss electoral reforms in a
broader discussion of other issues (the Palestinian issue, Islamist political parties, the Hashemite
regime's slow democratization). One of the reasons for this is the lack of reliable census, tribal,
and religious data for electoral districts, as well as complete election returns. While all of the
data is not readily available, there is enough to begin to study the impact of electoral mechanisms
on representation.
While Turkey has experimented with a variety of different electoral systems, and has
undergone several military coups, one of which rewrote the Constitution and abolished the
electoral system and its existing parties completely, several conditions have remained constant.
The focus of the government on maintaining a strict secular treatment of policy and public life
has successfully consumed virtually all political debate in the modem Turkish state. Military
coups have served to realign the political system to preempt movements toward a new Turkish
identity by those whose interests don't align with Mustafa Kemal's image of Turkey. The
Constitutional Court has, since the 1980 military coup, decided the constitutionality of political
parties and has banned many from elections.
Authoritarianismand Democracy
It is well understood that authoritarian regimes do usually not preemptively pursue
political liberalization. Arab-majority countries, in particular, have begun to move toward
democratization after being confronted with citizen protest due to poor economic conditions,
government corruption, and human rights abuses (Tessler 2005). While Tessler's (2005) finding
is focused on Arab countries, this democratization trend has not only occurred in these countries;
states in Latin America, Africa, and Eastern Europe have also pursued liberalization measures.
Those initial reforms were mainly used to appease the public and strengthen governmental
legitimacy. A principle strategy of liberalization has been, in many cases, to institute elections
for legislatures. While images of previously silent publics in places like Jordan and Morocco
heading to the polls on Election Day conjures up the image of a "proper" representative
government, specific mechanisms built into their systems repress the translation of votes into
seats. Jordan, for instance, opted for a rare electoral system to replace its previous system (with
first past the post rules but multi-member districts, without the proportionality), in addition to
refraining from distributing seats according to population. At the same time, other states with
well-established histories with free and fair elections have recently come under scrutiny for
similarly questionable policies. Turkey, for example, has been cited in many studies of electoral
mechanisms for its extraordinarily high election threshold and for the intrusion of unelected
officials into the system.
Within the literature regarding electoral systems, there are a multitude of topics that
address the particularities in Jordan and Turkey. First and foremost is electoral engineering, the
concept that by deliberately selecting specific mechanisms based on state characteristics like
economic development, education, social cleavages, and colonial legacy, one can steer a state
toward a certain system. In many cases, the "engineering" of systems is meant to give an
impression of deliberate, overt molding of an electoral system to best approach the most salient
issues facing a state. Typically the system is "engineered" by state builders, whether they are
occupying powers or elected representatives.
Recently, however, this term has come to have a more negative connotation, instead
intimating that governing regimes manipulate their electoral systems to maintain their dominance
in a state instead of suiting the nation's needs at large. In the cases of democratizing countries,
the overt manipulation of electoral mechanisms by the regime has overshadowed the bright
prospect to becoming full democracies. For Jordan, manipulation by the ruling regime has
maintained overrepresentation of the rural, desert population, while compromising the large
urban populations of Amman and Irbid.
At the same time, however, Jordan is arguably the safest and most stable country in the
Middle East: it maintains positive and strong relations with the United States, Israel, Saudi
Arabia, and Egypt, while also being the only country to permit and encourage Palestinian
refugees to become citizens. Jordan has no domestic terrorism problems, and with the exception
of the 2005 suicide bombings, it has been free of terrorist attacks for many years. In contrast to
states like Egypt, where Islamist politics is repressed, Jordan has a history of Islamist political
parties, and the Hashemite monarchy has a productive and overall positive relationship with the
Islamic Action Front, the only significant political party in Jordan. Since reestablishing elections
in 1989, the monarchy has altered Jordan's electoral system to a rare single non-transferable
voting system.
While the concept of electoral engineering has not been directly applied to Turkey (most
studies of electoral engineering cover state building or long-established democracies, and Turkey
does not really fit in either of these categories), several preliminary findings imply that there is
elite manipulation inherently through electoral mechanisms: the high election threshold, frequent
interventions by the military, party banning by the Constitutional Court, and ongoing friction
between "free and fair" elections and exclusion of certain policies from political discourse all
provide significant evidence of manipulation.
Electoral engineering
Norris (2004) examines the consequences of electoral rules and modernization for
political representation and voting. She studies patterns of party competition, social cleavages
and party loyalty, turnout levels, and diversity of parliaments, and determines from her study that
the formal rules of electoral institutions do matter when it comes to shaping social norms and
human behavior. Her study can be extended to studying countries transitioning to democracy.
When political elites or authoritarians engineer voting systems to work in their favor, they are
forcing elections one way or another.
Pippa Norris' study on electoral engineering presents and analyzes the arguments related
to electoral system design. She focuses on the dynamics between political party systems and
electoral systems, and notes that it is not just new democracies that are designing electoral
systems to meet a specific need; established democracies like Italy, New Zealand, and Japan
have reformed their electoral systems in the last 15 years (Norris 2004). She divides the effects
of electoral system design into two categories: mechanical effects (the translation of votes into
seats, for example) and psychological effects. Her analysis of electoral engineering is based on
two different theories about electoral system design: rational choice and modernization theory;
for the purposes of my study, her use of rational choice theory is most useful to me. Rational
choice theory, as applied to electoral system design, assumes that formal electoral rules shape the
incentives that political actors face, and that political actors seek to maximize their vote share by
utilizing electoral incentives inherent in the electoral system (Norris 2004, pp. 7).
Arend Lijphart's (1999) seminal work examines democratic institutions in 36 countries
from 1940 to the present. Beginning with a simple definition of the term "democracy," which is
"government by and for the people," he next raises the question of "who will do the governing,
and to whose interests should the government be responsive when the people are in disagreement
and have divergent preferences?" (Lijphart 1999 pp. 1). He focuses on measuring the level to
which the institutions are majoritarian or consensual, a contrast that is consistently used to
examine democracies. In majoritarian democracies, the answer to the question of "who governs"
is simply the majority of the people, while in consensual democracies the response is "as many
people as possible" (Lijphart 1999 pp. 2).
Lijphart also breaks down the differences between majoritarian and consensual
democracies into 10 characteristics along the executive-parties dimension and the federal-unity
dimension; these characteristics are organized in Table 2-1. The first dimension, executiveparties, provides insight into how the political system is organized; characteristics like the type
of party system, distribution of power among parties, electoral system, and type of system
installed for interest groups. The second, federal-unity, explains how centralized the federal
government is, and how consolidated individual branches of the government are; the number of
houses in the legislature, the degree of constitutional flexibility, level of judicial review, and
independence of the central bank.
Table 2-1: Fitting Characteristics of Democratic Systems to Jordan and Turkey
Description
Executive-parties
majorities v.
Concentration of Single-party
Single-party majorities v.
power
multiparty coalitions
Balance of
Dominant executive v.
power
equal power between
executive and legislative
Party system
Two-party v. multiparty
systems
Majoritarian v.
First past the post v.
PR
proportional representation
Jordan
Turkey
Royal Family, tribal
alliances
Dominant Executives
Multiparty coalitions
No organized system
Multiparty
Multi member districts
with 1st past the post
rules
PR with election
threshold
Interest group
Tightly controlled civil
Controlled civil society
systems
society
free-for-all competition v.
compromise
Federal-unity
I
Centralization of Unitary centralized v.
government
federal decentralized
systems
Number of
Unicameral v. multicameral
houses in
(division of power)
legislature
Constitution
Amendments by simple
flexibility
majority v. super majority
Judicial review
Legislatures get the final
word v. courts reviewing
the constitutionality of laws
Independence of
Dependent on the executive
central bank
v. independent central
banks
Equal Power
Centralized
Centralized
Multicameral
Unicameral
Super majority, or by
king
King has final word
2/3 majority, referendum
(proposed by MPs)
Independent
Independent
Constitutional Court
It is unclear from this model whether Turkey's system is a majoritarian or consensual
system. With respect to Jordan, it is not by any means a democracy, but the presence of an
elected legislature does make this model applicable. Turkey has a proportional representation
election system, which is assigned to consensual systems, but the presence of a unicameral
legislature indicates that it is a majoritarian system. The balance of power in Jordan's
government is heavily in favor of the monarch and the upper house of parliament (majoritarian),
but multiple parties are permitted to participate in elections (consensual). In Jordan's case, the
mere fact that it is a constitutional monarchy with a great deal of power vested in the king is
enough to prevent it from being called a "democracy," but does the presence of elections and
signs that the government is liberalizing the system present enough evidence that Jordan is
"democratizing"?
Lijphart (1999 pp. 6-8) criticizes those who have focused on identifying only majoritarian
systems as democracies, which is the less common of the two types of electoral systems. He
argues that consensual systems more closely fit the idea of a democracy than majoritarian
systems, and that to exclude consensual democracies from the discussion would retract greatly
from the study of representative governments (Lijphart 1999 pp. 31-33). Applying Lijphart's
terminology to Turkey and Jordan provides helpful indications on how best to examine each
system. Turkey falls best under the consensual democracy model with regard to its legislature,
while Jordan falls somewhere in between for the purposes of my study.
Electoral Systems
A study of the relationship between colonial legacy and electoral system shows that most
former British colonies and two-thirds of former French colonies now use majoritarian systems,
while three-quarters of former Portuguese colonies, two-thirds of former Spanish colonies, and
former Dutch colonies use proportional representation (Norris 2004 pp. 59). Former communist
countries tend to choose majoritarian systems.
There are a variety of different types of electoral systems, and most break these down
into two types: consensual and adversarial (Norris 2004 pp. 69). The first type, consensual
democracy, is identified by the presence of an elected legislature whose seats are assigned
proportionally with regards to the population. The theory behind consensual democracy is to
maximize electoral choice, fairly translate votes into seats, and to be socially inclusive (Norris
2004 pp. 69). PR systems are preferred in ethnically divided societies, although critiques of PR
systems indicate that it may serve to reinforce ethnic cleavages. Majoritarian, or adversarial,
systems are typically characterized by winner-take-all elections in single member districts.
While in PR systems the goal is for both minorities and majorities to have representation, in
majoritarian systems this does not tend to be the case. Lijphart (1999 pp. 143- 144) clearly has a
preference for PR systems, as he points out that in majority or plurality systems the winning
party is always overrepresented in comparison to the votes it received.
Norris (2004 pp. 51) discusses PR systems, which are considered by most to be
consensual systems. Turkey's PR system uses the D'Hondt method for allocating seats in the
Grand National Assembly. Through a series of quotients, parties with the highest average vote
share, are assigned seats. Since 1983, the 10% national election threshold has posed an additional
barrier to parties- only those parties that win 10% of the nationwide votes in the legislative
elections are eligible for seats. After those parties are determined, the seats are then allocated
within each electoral district.
Representation
The essence of democratic governance is the concept that citizens choose representatives
to act on their behalf. In a true democracy, all citizens are assigned equal power to choose their
representatives. At the very least the right to vote must be universal in order for an electoral
system to be "representative."
Manin (1997 pp. 6) outlines four principles present in representative regimes since its
creation: elections at regular intervals, decisions by governing body independent from electorate,
political expression by electorate with fear of repercussion, and political debate before decisions
are made. For the purposes of my study, I focus on the first principle: that of elections.
Pitkin (1967) discusses two formal definitions of representation- authorization to act and
accountability- and the concept of representation as standing for rather than acting for something,
first with descriptive representation and then with symbolic representation. Another type of
representation she looks at is that of acting for others, which includes the act itself, not just the
formalistic ideas of action (Pitkin 1967). She poses it as a tension between ideal and
achievement, in that the ideal of political representation can never be reached but should not be
abandoned, while the reality of political representation is not sufficient but is the best possible
system at the time (Pitkin 1967). Methods of political representation, according to Pitkin, should
improve over time.
In ethnically diverse societies, the use of ethnic quotas is often used to guarantee minority
representation. In consociationalism, an extreme version of the quota system, all seats of the
government are assigned to members of a specific ethnic or religious group. Lebanon, for
example, follows this model. The use of ethnic quotas like those in Jordan, are more prevalent.
Christians, Circassians and Chechens, and women are all guaranteed representation in the House
of Deputies.
Measuring how representative elected officials are in a given democracy can be done in
several ways. At the most basic level, the vote of any one citizen must be given equal weight to
the vote of any other citizen. Determining whether representatives are allocated according to
population distribution the first step to determine the level of representation in a system.
Calculating the number of votes in a system that is represented in the government is
another angle to take. The only way to avoid malapportionment is to allocate seats on a single
nationwide district. The transformation of votes into seats is never exactly proportional, so
determining exactly how many votes did not win seats is an important indicator.
In states with strong party systems, calculating the number of parties active in politics is
another way to measure representation. By comparing the effective number of parties in a
system with two different values, the proportion of votes and proportion of seats won by each
party, the translation of votes into seats can be examined. For majoritarian systems, there are
typically two effective parties, while in consensual democracies there are several (Duverger
1972). Before Turkey adopted a PR system, its majoritarian style democracy resulted in a twoparty system; after 1961, the number of parties increased to take advantage of the new
consensual system.
Representation in Jordan and Turkey
The history of Jordan as a state and its experiences with elections provide important clues
leading to the motivations for the Hashemites to malapportion its legislature: the status of Jordan
as a monarchy with all government power vested in a King; its stance on the Palestinian issue,
combined with its sizable Palestinian population; its history with the Muslim Brotherhood and
other Islamist groups; the position of Jordan with respect to its neighbors and allies. All of these
clues indicate that Jordan's electoral system may be out of the ordinary, but how can it be best
analyzed? First, how representative is the Jordanian House of Deputies? Second, if the system is
truly not representing its constituency, who is not being represented? Third, how does this
malapportionment affect regime competitors like the Islamic Action Front? Finally, is there a
measurable impact of malapportionment on turnout?
Past studies of Turkey's electoral system have largely focused on the determinants of
party for voters and examining the evolution of parties in Turkey. Scholars point to the high
election threshold as a mechanism by which the regime controls the outcome of parliamentary
elections, but to the best of my knowledge, there has been no research to determine how much
representation is affected by the threshold. Several scholars (Ahmad 1988, Yavuz 1997, Mecham
2004) have examined the rise of Islamist parties in Turkey, with a specific focus on the late
1980s and 1990s, noting that they have received greater support both at the polls and in public
opinion surveys recently. Haqqani (2003) warns of the impact of the Iraq war on Turkey,
especially with relation to the AKP's leadership and the future of the Kurdish in southeastern
Turkey. Arat (1998) focuses her study on the two faces of the women's rights movement in
Turkey, the struggle for equality with men and the struggle for religious expression.
In both countries, political debate and analysis has focused around the inclusion and
exclusion of different groups, whether they are ethnic minorities or Islamist politicians. By
dissecting the effect of election mechanisms on the excluded groups, this research provides
insight into the power of manipulative electoral engineering to repress and control political
opponents. In both cases, the Islamist political parties acting within the bounds of law in each
country act as the excluded groups. Turkey's AKP has a direct link to the other Islamist-oriented
active political parties throughout Turkey's modern history, and appears to have overcome the
obstacles to gain representation in the Grand National Assembly. The Islamic Action Front in
Jordan, on the other hand, has won fewer seats in every election since 1993. In Chapter 3, I
provide a history of Jordan since World War I, and focus on the role of elections in forming its
national identity. I also discuss the historical background of the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood
and its political arm, the Islamic Action Front Party.
Chapter 3
A Model for Authoritarians: Votes without Seats
In this chapter, I provide an overview of the
relevant history of Jordan since the end of World War
I. I then discuss the evolution of elections in Jordan,
and examine the progression of Islamist politics in
Jordan. With this knowledge, I review past
1: Ajlun
2: Jarash
3: Al Balqa'
Madaba
scholarship on politics in Jordan, and pose some
crucial unanswered questions, especially with respect
to mechanisms that may maintain regime control over
competition in Jordan's elections.
Figure 3-1: Governorates of Jordan
Jordan's modem history is deeply intertwined with the Israeli/Palestinian conflict: a great
deal of Jordan's national identity today is a result of the Hashemite monarchy's (and others)
policies with regard to Palestinians since the end of World War I. The absence of an economic
base has forced Jordan to be dependent on its British, American, and Gulf Arab allies. Abdallah
I, King Hussein, and Abdallah II all have been required to juggle domestic pressures (the
Palestinian issue as well as the threat of radical Islam) with political demands from their
creditors (Boulby 1999). The Hashemite family has governed Jordan since its independence,
steering Jordan through a tumultuous time in the Middle East. Brokering peace with Israel,
welcoming Palestinians into their country, building strong alliances with Western powers,
containing the threat of Islamist politics- in all these ways, Jordan has maintained stability in a
region known more for the fragility of most regimes and its radical politics than steadiness.
Robinson (1998) studies the "defensive democratization" path that Jordan has taken and
asks whether Jordan can withstand the political volatility and Islamization of Palestinian politics
in the region. He claims that the greatest threat to Jordan's security is peace, not conflict: a
resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict through the creation of an independent Palestinian state
will pose a threat to the power of the Hashemite monarchy. With projections that between 40 and
60% of the Jordanian population are of Palestinian descent, the Kingdom is at risk if the conflict
is resolved.
The Jordanian-PalestinianConnection
Until the end of World War I, Jordan was a part of the Ottoman Empire. European
colonial powers redrew borders and divided up all of the Middle East between themselves. Both
Jordan and mandatory Palestine were created out of the British mandate, while Syria became the
French Mandate. British colonial powers had in the past been supportive of the creation of a
Palestinian state along the West Bank of the Jordan River. However, in 1917 the Balfour
Declaration surprised Palestinians by stating that the British viewed "with favor the
establishment in Palestine of a National Home for the Jewish people" (Abu-Odeh 1999).
Abdallah at this time was appointed the Emir of Transjordan, and he began to build a state.
Jordan's first constitution, which was not written until February 1928, established a
legislative assembly, but, due to British concern for loss of authority, it was essentially powerless
(Boulby 1999). Elections were also held to select the 21-man Legislative Council, but were
strictly controlled through the use of indirect balloting. A popular uprising against the agreement
occurred despite a lack of political organization in July of 1928, called the National Congress.
The movement's leaders, however, failed to follow up on their threat of an elections boycott, and
so the legislature devolved into a "rubber stamp for British policies" (Boulby 1999 pp. 11).
Abdallah I governed Transjordan under British supervision until 1946, when the United
Nations approved an end to the British Mandate rule. The new Jordanian Parliament named him
the first ruler of the new Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. At this time, only the land east of the
Jordan River was considered part of the Hashemite Kingdom.
When Israel declared statehood in 1948, however, Jordan's boundaries were expanded to
include the West Bank and its Palestinian population. There is a range of opinions on the
motivation for the annexation. King Abdallah believed that annexing the West Bank was
essential for two reasons: his control would extend to Palestine and Syria and compensate for
losses suffered by the Hashemites when they were driven out of the Hijaz and Damascus in the
1920s; it also appealed to the Hashemite responsibility to act as guardians of East Jerusalem
(Boulby 1999). For others, the West Bank had human and material resources that were
otherwise unavailable in Jordan (Wilson 1987). Since the West Bank hadn't been claimed by
other states, some believe it was rational for him to claim it for his own (Wilson 1987). There
are competing reviews of King Abdallah I's leadership during this time: some consider him a
hero (see Salibi 1998, Wilson 1987) while others brand him an exploiter (see Nevo 1996).
The 1967 war between Israel and Egypt, Jordan, and Syria caused an influx of refugees
into the surrounding Arab states, including Jordan. During the war, Jordan lost control over the
West Bank and east Jerusalem to Israel. The tension between the Palestinian Liberation
Organization (PLO) and Jordanians as a result of the war's outcome deepened the rift between
East and West Bankers. Tensions between the PLO and the Jordanian state grew until they came
to a head in September of 1970, an event that is now called "Black September." A series of two
battles fought in Jordan between Yasser Arafat and his PLO and King Hussein and the Jordanian
Army, Black September ended in the eviction of the PLO forces and caused the deaths of
approximately 7,000 people (Massad 2001).
Black September strengthened Palestinians' sense of nationalism, and renewed
Palestinian resentment toward the Hashemite regime (Abu-Odeh 1999). In addition, the
Jordanian elite began to push Palestinians out of the political and public sectors, with the
majority of effort coming from the intelligence service.
Up until this time, the Hashemites had dealt with the Palestinians in Jordan as a problem
of integration: by including Palestinians in the workings of the state and society, King Hussein
believed he could dispel Palestinian nationalism within the Palestinian-Jordanians (Abu-Odeh
1999). He also maintained a commitment to the idea that if a solution to the Palestinian problem
were reached, it would mean the reattachment of the West Bank to the East Bank (Abu-Odeh
1999). However, following the events of Black September and the Treaty of Peace Jordan
signed with Israel, some say that Hussein began to depart from this view. For them, Hussein
now saw Jordan as one state and Palestine as another, which also lent itself easily to the idea that
Palestinian-Jordanians were to be treated differently than the Transjordanians.
King Hussein's reign successfully integrated Palestinian-Jordanians into the kingdom,
and by the 1980s they held a large stake in the success of Jordan and Hashemite's agenda
(Satloff 1986, Boulby 1999). This success is seen as an important step in "neutralizing the
Palestinian threat" to the stability of the Jordanian state (Satloff 1986). This threat, however, is
seen as secondary to other pressures, like the one posed by Islamic activism.
As a rentier state, Jordan relied on international rents to cover a large share of its
government revenue. Since many of the countries Jordan depended upon were Arab oil-rich
countries, during the 1980 recession these rents were no longer available. In addition, the
Jordanian currency, the dinar, lost half of its value during this time. As a result Jordan looked to
the IMF for assistance and in turn cut public expenditures, leading toward public unrest and
rioting in 1989.
The elections of 1989 signaled the beginning of a liberalization process in Jordan;
accompanying the return of elections was greater freedom of the press and political
organizations. In 1991, the regime released the National Charter, which committed the state to
the pursuit of a multiparty political system, greater freedom of the press, and a heavier focus on
civil liberties (Boulby 1999). At the heart of the National Charter was an understanding that
greater freedom for Jordanians, in their political as well as civil lives, would be tied to continued
allegiance toward the monarchy. Robinson's classification of this policy, "defensive
democratization," illustrates Hussein's view that regardless of the presence of elections, he
would remain the ultimate authority in the political system. Other places where this opinion is
visible are that members of the upper house continue to be appointed by the king, and that the
king can overrule policies on which he disagrees with the parliament (Boulby 1999). Since the
rise of Abdallah II, however, there has been an increasing restraint from the regime to overturn
parliamentary policies.
In 1994, Jordan and Israel signed a peace treaty, brokered by the United States and
Russia. As a result of this, the United States increased its aid contributions to Jordan and created
several policies in favor of Jordanian exports to the US. Shortly before his death in 1999, King
Hussein changed the line of succession to allow his son, Abdallah II, to become king after his
death. Hussein's brother Hassan had served as crown prince prior to this decision. Since his
accession to the throne, Jordan's economy, education, and health care have flourished. Abdallah
II has continued his father's policies of defensive democratization and economic opening. In
2008, a new political parties law imposed new requirements on Jordan's political parties,
including requiring a minimum membership of 500 and obtaining a certificate of government
support in order to be legal. The parties that cannot meet these new requirements are considered
unconstitutional under the new law.
Elections in Jordan:A short leash
In this section, I discuss the history of elections in Jordan: Jordanians have had some
experience in electing government representatives since its occupation during the British
Mandate. Jordan is a constitutional monarchy, with executive power vested in the King. The
King is responsible for signing and executing all laws. The National Assembly, Jordan's
legislature, is divided into two houses: the Senate, whose members are appointed by the King,
and the House of Deputies, who are elected by popular vote. Jordan is divided into twelve
governorates, each with an appointed governor. Each governorate has the sole authority for any
governmental development projects in its area.
Jordan's experience with elections goes back to 1929, while still under British rule.
Since the British were concerned about ceding power to the Jordanian people, the first
legislature, with 21 members, held little actual power (Boulby 1999). Indirect ballots kept a
reign on the people while also permitting elections to occur; this control resulted in an
overrepresentation of minorities. Boulby (1999) describes the system as advancing a policy of
"divide and rule, ensuring that council seats were awarded to regime loyalists with a variety of
different interests."
Abdallah's first moves after independence were to increase the size of the legislature by
20 men and the number of districts from four to nine. Although these reforms appeared to
improve representation, they actually served to increase the power of the rural (and generally,
pro-Hashemite) areas, and decrease the power of the more populous towns (Boulby 1999).
Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the towns grew tremendously in size, wealth, and political
sophistication (Boulby 1999).
After annexation of the West Bank, King Abdallah dissolved the parliament and held
parliamentary elections in 1950. Both East Bankers and West Bankers were to be represented in
the new parliament with twenty seats each in the Lower House; representation of both Banks was
not equal, however, in the Upper House (which was appointed by the King)- there were twelve
seats for East Bankers and eight for West Bankers in it. When the parliament first convened, it
adopted a resolution officially naming the country the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. The
combination of this declaration (devoid of the term "Palestine") and the leadership appointments
the King made (the speaker and prime minister, the most powerful political appointees next to
the King, were both East Bankers) solidified the notion that the King wanted to create a singular
Jordanianidentity, which would include the West Bank and its inhabitants as part of this new
state. According to Abu-Odeh (1999), there were twice as many Palestinian-Jordanians as
Jordanians in the new state, and half of those West Bankers were refugees.
In May 1951, one year after the parliament convened, King Abdallah dissolved the
parliament again. Boulby (1999) points to several criticisms by the parliament that led to its
dissolution: it questioned foreign control of the Arab Legion, high salaries for foreigners, and the
special creation of the king's bodyguard service, known as the Royal Hashemite Regiment.
Shortly after this, Palestinian nationalists assassinated Abdallah.
Talal, Abdallah's son reigned for a short, but promising time. A new constitution was
written in 1952, which outlined fundamental rights (including equality before the law, the right
to property, religious ceremonies, opinion, and the right to hold public meetings and form
political parties) and enhanced the role of the legislature. The Chamber of Deputies gained the
right to hold the ministers responsible for their actions, and the chamber also was granted
authority over financial matters, foreign affairs, and impeachment of ministers (Boulby 1999).
In addition, future administrations were required to receive a vote of confidence from the
Chamber, and a two-thirds majority of the members would remove an administration from
power. While these powers were enhanced, the monarchy retained the right to impose martial
law and to suspend the parliament.
When King Hussein came to power in 1952, he faced significant political pressure from
Palestinian and pan-Arab nationalist parties. Through intimidation, army voting, and general
government interference, Hussein and his regime successfully silenced the opposition in the
elections of 1954. Hussein could not maintain his policy of stifling opposition, and following
riots in 1955 in response to his decision to join the Baghdad Pact, Hussein withdrew from the
Pact and Jordan had free elections in 1956 that brought to power Arab nationalists and antimonarchists. The Prime Minister, Sulayman al Nabulsi, was a member of the National Socialist
Party, and his first acts as the leader of the new government were to revoke the Anglo-Jordanian
Treaty and to move towards entering diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. Hussein
vehemently opposed communism, and in doing so gained the support of the Muslim
Brotherhood. Hussein ultimately dismissed the cabinet, and after uncovering a plot to overthrow
the monarchy, he dismissed the legislature, dissolved political parties and instituted martial law
in 1957.
While Hussein did lift martial law between 1963 and 1967, the regime maintained a tight
grip on elections. In 1963, the Chamber of Deputies returned a vote of no confidence, and King
Hussein dissolved the legislature (Boulby 1999). After the elections of 1967, Jordan returned to
martial law and did not have elections again until 1989; the parliament was also not reconvened
until 1984.
King Hussein, to appease the public, reconvened the legislature in 1984. The first act of
this legislature was to permit elections only on the East Bank (Boulby 1999). Even though
political parties were banned, two members of the Muslim Brotherhood (who were backed by the
Muslim Brotherhood, not running on behalf of it) and one independent Islamist, all campaigning
in support of Shari'alaw, were elected to seats (Boulby 1999) Since then there have been four
more parliamentary elections, the most recent in November 2007. The regime has made several
revisions to the electoral law since 1989: lifting the ban on political parties, changing the
electoral system, reapportioning seats in the parliament, creating nationwide women's seats, and
increasing the number of seats in Parliament.
The elections in 1989 and previously were held under a Block voting system, in which
voters were given as many votes as there were seats in their district. At that time there were
eighty members of the House of Deputies (the Lower House of Parliament), divided into twenty
constituencies. Each constituency had anywhere from two to nine representatives, but their seats
were not distributed proportionally with the population in each district. In the 1989 election
political parties were banned from elections. In 1993 King Hussein changed the system to a
single non-transferable vote system (SNTV). In this system, constituencies with multiple MPs
remained, but the voters were given only one vote. In announcing this reform, King Hussein
invoked the term "one person, one vote," which is slightly misleading in Jordan's case. The
principle is usually used to describe the universal right to vote, which includes both the right of
each citizen to cast a vote in elections and the requirement that every vote is equivalent to each
other. While each citizen is allowed one vote in Jordan, individual votes are not equally powerful
in expressing preferences. This will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 4.
"The new temporary law entitles the electorate to cast one vote for one candidate in the
new lower house of parliament. At this delicate stage, I have taken into consideration the
necessity of limiting the amendment to the election law to this aspect, due to my belief that any
other amendment that aims at equating the number of the electorate in a constituency with that of
another would mean depriving larger parts of the country of the right to effective parliamentary
representation, which is necessary to improve their conditions, and ensure equal distribution of
Jordan's comprehensive development... I would like to emphasize that my government and I, as
a father and a brother to each citizen, do not support one side over another. I call upon you all to
realize that the Arab Hashemite Hussein, who has been honored by Almighty God to be a
descendent of the Prophet Muhammad bin Abdallah, peace be upon him, is above all worldly
titles and positions." -King Hussein
("Address on Election Law Amendments" August 17, 1993. Translated from Arabic)
While Hussein maintained that the new system was more representative, it is shown later
that this is hardly the case. In 2001 Jordan again experienced electoral change when King
Abdallah II increased the number of constituencies from 21 to 45 and added 24 seats to the
House of Deputies. The additional seats were distributed among almost all districts, but not to
adjust for population changes. Then in 2003 a quota was added for women: the six highest votegetting female candidates (at the national level) would all receive seats in the House.
Table 3-1 describes the electoral changes since 1989, highlighting the size of the House
of Deputies, the number of constituencies, the electoral system used, additional conditions
surrounding the reforms, and the overall success of the Islamic Action Front, the main Islamist
political party. The "MPs" column provides the number of members required in the House of
Deputies and "Districts" shows the number of districts into which Jordan was divided (if it is
known). For example, in 2001, the House of Deputies was expanded to include 104 MPs and 45
electoral districts. The "Additional Stipulations" column includes important information related
to the elections; for example it notes that the 1989 elections were held during the nationwide ban
on political parties.
Table 3-1: The Evolution of Jordan's Electoral System
Year
1929
Electoral
System
Bloc
MPs Districts
21
4
Bloc
Bloc
40
40
9
9
1946
1946
1950
Additional Stipulations
Islamic Action Front
Won : Fielded Candidates
Independence
1951
1952
1957
1963
1967
20 for West, 20 for East
ParliamentDissolved
Parliamentreconvened
MartialLaw
ParliamentReconvened
MartialLaw, ParliamentDissolved
1967
1984
1989
Bloc
Bloc
80
20
1993
1997
2001
2003
2007
SNTV
SNTV
SNTV
SNTV
SNTV
80
80
104
110
110
21
21
45
45
45
40
ParliamentReconvened
Political parties ban; ethnic
quotas
Ban lifted; ethnic quotas
12 Circassians and Christians
6 women quota
6 women, plus 1 elected
in addition to quota
22:80 (MB, not IAF)
16:36
0 (Boycott)
No election
16:30
6:22
Today, the Parliament in Jordan is divided into two houses: the Senate, whose members
are appointed by the King, and the House of Deputies, which has 110 elected Ministers of
Parliament. The 110 seats are divided into forty-five constituencies, with six seats reserved for
women, nine for Christians, and three for Circassians; the rest of the seats are specifically
assigned to Muslims. The Christian and Circassian seats are distributed throughout provinces
where large portions of these minorities live. Table 3-2 provides an overview of the current
makeup of the House of Deputies, organized by governorate. It includes the total number of
seats allotted to that governorate, the breakdown of those seats by ethnic/religious group, and the
number of districts assigned to that governorate. I have separated the Bedouin regions from their
respective governorates because they have their own named districts and are created distinct
from their governorates.
Table 3-2: Distribution of Seats by Governorate, 2003-present
Govemorate/
Region
Amman
Irbid
Balqa
Karak
Zarqa
Ma'an
Mafraq
Tafileh
Madaba
Jerash
Ajloun
Aqaba
North Badia
Central Badia
South Badia
Number of
Districts
7
9
4
6
4
3
1
2
2
1
2
1
1
1
1
Women's Quota
--
--
--
--
6 Nationwide
Total
45
92
3
9
110
Muslim
20
15
8
8
8
4
4
4
3
4
3
2
3
3
3
Breakdown of Seats
Christian
Circassian
2
1
0
1
0
2
0
2
1
1
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
1
0
0
0
1
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
Total
23
16
10
10
10
4
4
4
4
4
4
2
3
3
3
The turnout rate in 2003 was 58.87% across the country, but turnout varied among the
districts themselves. For example, in Karak the turnout was 86% while in Amman it was
44.62%. Tables B-l, B-2 and B-3 in the Appendix outline the turnout rate, the percentage of
eligible votes, and the proportion of the House of Deputies' seats that are distributed to each
district. There is large variation in turnout, in addition to the proportion of the total population
living in that electoral district.
The Muslim Brotherhoodin Jordan: the Roots of the IAF
A number of analyses on the role of Islam in politics have noted that the political
relationship between the Jordanian regime and Islamic movements have resulted in the
secularization of religion, giving it a special place in political debate (Moaddel 2002, Nevo 1996,
Boulby 1999). The Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan has its roots in young Jordanians in Amman
and other urban areas in the 1940s and 1950s. Despite the growth in political organization, with
the creation of the Muslim Brotherhood and the National Socialist Party, there was no real threat
or competitor to the authority of King Abdallah until the annexation of the West Bank in 1948.
Boulby (1999) breaks the early life of the Muslim Brotherhood into three phases: its
creation by a wealthy merchant and evolution into a close group of merchants focused on
supporting the jihad in Palestine between 1946 and 1948; the growth of membership to include
the young professional class and expansion of goals beyond Palestine to include the imposition
of Shari'a,or Islamic, law in Jordan from 1948 to 1952; the formalization of ideology from 1954
to 1957 to defending Hashemite rule and advocating implementing Shari'alaw. This latter goal,
however, was downplayed by the Brotherhood in its political platforms (Boulby 1999). Between
1954 and 1957, the Brotherhood took two significant steps to increase its political influence: it
took part in the 1954 and 1956 elections, and formally resolved to defend the Hashemites against
challengers (Boulby 1999). In return, Hussein permitted the Brotherhood to operate legally
within Jordan; the Muslim Brotherhood, in fact, was the only political organization not banned in
1957 when Hussein introduced martial law.
Three events contributed to the growth of support and legitimacy of the Muslim
Brotherhood: its participation in elections in the 1950s, the Arab defeat in the 1967 war, and the
weakening of the PLO from the 1970-71 war. Through the early 1980s, the Muslim Brotherhood
in Jordan maintained a peaceful coexistence with the Jordanian government, but increased
pressure to democratize and implement Shari'a law from the Brotherhood compromised this
relationship in the mid 1980s. While relations between the two groups were positive enough for
members of the Muslim Brotherhood to participate in the 1989 elections, the Muslim
Brotherhood began to more proactively recruit, and strong public support for the movement
bolstered this activity. In these elections, the Muslim Brotherhood did not run as a party (as
political parties were still banned), but instead backed specific independent candidates.
From 1989 to 1993, the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan solidified its commitment to
action and Islam as the solution to Jordan's socioeconomic issues, but did not make specific
proposals beyond that. The Brotherhood did not have plans for its political agenda, aimed at
either recruiting or campaigning. Boulby (1999) focuses on the Brotherhood's rejection of
violence as a tool, and its engagement in the parliament to influence policymaking and reform.
At the same time, however, the regime began a top-down containment policy towards the
Brotherhood, especially since the Brotherhood was a member of the most powerful bloc in
parliament (Boulby 1999). While in the past the Brotherhood's interests aligned well with those
of the regime, they started to diverge with the return of elections in 1989. This containment
consisted of permitting the Brotherhood to take part in the lower House of Deputies and
simultaneously appointing traditional East Bank elites to the Senate and discouraging members
of the Brotherhood from trying to join the cabinet (Boulby 1999). The Muslim Brotherhood
capitalized especially on the PLO's absence from the East Bank by winning support from
Palestinians in Jordan.
The First Gulf War had a great deal of impact on Jordanian politics: initially, the Muslim
Brotherhood strongly opposed the Iraqi invasion and occupation of Kuwait; when the United
States began preparing to intervene, however, the Brotherhood's opinion changed. The
Brotherhood organized quickly to galvanize public opinion and politicians in parliament against
the King's support of the United States. As a result of the support the Brotherhood garnered
during this time, Hussein offered the Muslim Brotherhood five prominent cabinet positions
(education, religious affairs, health, social development, and justice).
According to Boulby (1999), Jordan came out of the Gulf War stronger economically and
strategically, at the expense of the Islamists, although this assertion is debatable. Hussein also
became involved with the Arab-Israeli peace process, which set the Islamists further back in
political influence. Hussein dismissed the cabinet in 1991, and recommended to the Brotherhood
that they not seek seats in the new government. In addition, Hussein approved the National
Charter, which placed limitations on party activities, especially fundraising outside the country (a
practice the Brotherhood had relied on for its operations). Tensions between the regime and the
Muslim Brotherhood remained high after 1991.
In 1992, the Brotherhood founded the Islamic Action Front in response to the National
Charter's ratification, which had prohibited parties that had ties outside the country. The Islamic
Action Front's platform was almost identical to the Brotherhood's, and included stances on such
issues as women's rights. In the run-up to the 1993 elections, Hussein sought to limit the success
of the IAF in the elections: he banned organized rallies, transferred teachers with connections to
the IAF to other parts of the country, dissolved the parliament, and changed the electoral law
through royal decree, although these decisions were not all targeted at the IAF alone. Shortly
before the electoral law revision, the PLO and Israel signed the Oslo Accords.
Since the 1993 elections, IAF participation in elections has varied. It boycotted elections
in 1997 and participated in most municipal elections, but when it campaigned in 2003 and 2007,
it lost a significant number of seats. Today, the IAF holds six seats in the House of Deputies, the
fewest since it began participating in elections. The IAF attributes its failures at the polls to the
electoral system and malapportioned districts.
Conclusion
The history of elections in Jordan has provided perspective on the motivations of the
ruling regime in pursuing limited democratization. Jordan's stability is threatened by a future
peace between the Palestinians and Israel, and the tight control that the monarchy has held over
its people has resulted in Jordan being one of the most stable and safe Arab state in the Middle
East. Jordan has no domestic terrorism issues, and while it is most surely not a democracy,
Jordanians have more voice in government than many of its neighbors' average citizens.
Despite these positive results, there is still the issue of malapportionment. Despite the
assertion that malapportionment is widespread and severe, measurement of it has not occurred.
In Chapter 4, I examine the election results from the 1993, 1997, and 2003 elections, placing
specific emphasis on several characteristics: the ratio of population to parliamentary seats, the
location of successful IAF campaigns, and district level turnout.
Chapter 4
Targeted Control of Islamists: Jordan and Malapportionment
In Chapter 3, I provided an overview of the history of Jordan as a state and discussed the
political climate that exists there. Scholars have tended to claim that Jordan's electoral system is
not representative of its citizens, but data limitations have prevented them from conducting a
thorough analysis. Jordan's position on the future of the Palestinians and the possibility that
Palestinians make up half or more of its population and the longstanding threat of radical political
Islam in Muslim countries and Jordan's individual history with Islamist politics- both of these
reasons put the Hashemite regime in a precarious situation, especially when it is on a
liberalization path.
These reasons, however, are merely conjectures without compelling evidence of
deliberate electoral mechanisms to reduce representation. By determining the level of
malapportionment present at the district level in Jordan for each election, and tracking the
winning Islamic Action Front candidates in these elections, I uncover these targeted mechanisms
for control. I define malapportionment (M) as population share divided by seat share (S) in a give
district. When M<1, the district is overrepresented; when M>1 the district is underrepresented (a
score of one translates to perfect apportionment). I will use the log(M) to display regressions for
ease of viewing.
Many data limitations constrained the depth of analysis. Only winning MPs' vote shares
are available for analysis, which prevents many calculations like vote-seat proportionality from
being made. Even the names and affiliations of the losing candidates are not readily available, so
examining the caliber and distribution of opponents is also impossible. In addition, these data
gaps prevent a comparison between successful and unsuccessful IAF political campaigns.
Despite these issues, there are several approaches that can be taken with the. First, how
malapportioned are the electoral districts in Jordan and is there an identifiable pattern in this
malapportionment? Second, does this malapportionment have an effect on political parties,
especially the IAF? Finally, how do turnout rates vary across governorates and is there a
relationship between malapportionment and turnout? Even with such limited data, the results are
quite compelling.
In an ethnically heterogeneous state like Jordan, ethnic quotas in the government are
typical mechanisms to improve representation of ethnic groups. In these states, however, census
results usually dictate the size of ethnic quotas. There is no census data available that includes
either a religious or ethnic description of Jordan. While I cannot prove the misrepresentation of
ethnic groups at the district or governorate level for ethnic/religious groups, I show that the
national-level seat distribution and demographic statistics are in conflict by using CIA World
Factbook data.
In this chapter I examine the levels of malapportionment for the 1993, 1997, and 2003
elections to determine if there is a pattern of misrepresentation. I begin by using census data to
measure how malapportioned the electoral districts are. I also look at ethnic and religious
representation in the House of Deputies over time: as the number of MPs increased and
distribution of seats changed due to redistricting, the number of seats reserved for minorities did
not proportionally increase as well- does this indicate a trend toward more equal representation or
less? I relate these mechanisms to the success of the Islamic Action Front. I examine the success
of the IAF in relation to district levels of malapportionment over time and size of the districts in
question.
I also measure the IAF's performance in 2007 (winning a record low six seats in the
House of Deputies), and look for links to previously established mechanisms for control. Finally,
I look for evidence showing consequences for misrepresentation like those present in Jordan's
system: turnout on election day suffers where there is malapportionment in the system.
SNTV. Superproportional?
The literature is divided on the properties of single non-transferable voting systems: do
they belong as a subset of PR or majoritarian systems? Lijphart (1999 pp. 145) classifies SNTV
as "semiproportional," while Norris (2004 pp. 48-49) considers it to be majoritarian. Indeed, in
her consideration of SNTV, Norris (2004 Ibid.) points out that others have classified SNTV as
semi-proportional or proportional, but she refrains from classifying it as so.
Under Jordan's SNTV system, multimember districts undergo elections in which voters
have one vote. While there are multiple candidates running for several seats, the voters
themselves can only vote for one of the candidates. There are two competing theories regarding
the effect of this system on the outcomes of elections: one view is that it tends to give small
political parties seat bonuses larger in comparison to those for the bigger political parties;
another argument is that governing parties receive the advantage since they have better access to
particularistic benefits (Cox 1996).
Cox (1996) tests these two hypotheses by examining elections to the lower house of the
Japanese Diet. Specifically, he looks at election results for two large governing parties and
shows that they are more efficient at securing a maximum number of seats than their oppositions.
This result leads one to think that it will be the ruling parties or powers in an SNTV system that
will be the most successful in securing seats. Although Jordan's political actors are not
organized into political parties in the American sense of the term, the results of this study can
definitely be applied to the Jordan case. It supports the claim that the electoral system in Jordan
is maintaining the status quo, i.e., the power of the regime loyalists, and that it hurts the
opposition (mainly, the Islamic Action Front, as the organized political party).
Table 4-1 provides the mean vote percentages for winners among different groups in
Jordan. The top of the table has the average votes for the IAF and Independents. IAF MPs won
on average 11.28% of the vote in 1993 and 15.90% of the vote in 2003. The Independent MPs
won 9.41% in 1993, 9.92% in 1997, and 13.32% in 2003. Among specific groups, the Bedouin
MPs won on average much higher percentages of the vote in their districts, perhaps because there
were fewer candidates running. Christians won very small vote shares, as did Circassians;
Muslim MPs won on average a range of 10 to 16% of their districts' votes.
Table 4-1: Mean Vote Share for Winners
Mean Vote
1993
1997
2003
IAF
11.28
--
15.90
Independents
Bedouin
Christian
Circassian
9.41
22.45
3.05
4.53
9.92
16.09
4.42
8.89
13.32
11.56
6.90
4.24
Muslim
10.09
10.14
15.54
Women
--
--
6.67
Table 4-2 provides the mean DM and mean vote share for MPs in each governorate (and
the Bedouin districts separately). As the DM increases, the size of the mean vote share should
decrease, as more candidates and seats are in play. So larger mean DM should correspond with
smaller mean vote shares. In 1993, the largest mean DM is in Karak, with nine seats: its
corresponding mean vote share for winning MPs is 4.44% of the vote. The regions with the
smallest mean DM are the Bedouins and Jerash in 1993 and 1997, and Ma'an, Aqaba, Irbid
Madaba and Tafileh in 2003. Overall, the small DM districts do have the larger mean vote share.
Lijphart (1994) calculates the effective threshold of an electoral system to be the average
of the upper and lower bound of vote share that a party could win in order to win seats. This
calculation is helpful in that it approximates the maximum vote share a candidate could receive
and not win. Since the mean DM in Jordan varies so much by governorates, applying it at the
governorate-level to the system in Jordan. Using this formula, I have calculated the effective
threshold for each governorate in Jordan.
50% 50%
+eff M+I 2M
Effective Threshold
T --
Table 4-2: Vote Distribution for Winners: By Governorate
1993
1997
Bedouin
Jerash
Ajloun
Mafraq
Tafileh
Amman
Irbid
Ma'an
Zarqa
Balqa'a
Karak
Mean
DM
2.0
2.0
3.0
3.0
3.0
3.5
5.0
5.0
6.0
8.0
9.0
29.2
29.2
20.8
20.8
20.8
18.3
13.3
13.3
11.3
8.7
7.8
Mean
Vote
22.5
15.3
7.7
13.8
11.6
12.3
7.0
12.2
6.0
5.2
4.4
Aqaba
--
--
--
2.0
Madaba
--
--
--
3.0
Te,-
Mean
DM
Teff
2.0 29.2
2.0 29.2
3.0 20.8
3.0 20.8
3.0 20.8
3.5 18.3
5.0 13.3
5.0 13.3
6.0 11.3
8.0
8.7
9.0
7.8
2003
Mean
Vote
16.1
12.7
7.2
14.5
10.6
12.0
7.3
12.8
7.1
4.9
5.8
Mean
DM
3.0
4.0
2.0
4.0
2.0
3.3
1.8
1.3
10.0
2.5
1.7
20.8
16.3
29.2
16.3
29.2
19.3
32.0
40.3
7.1
24.3
33.7
Mean
Vote
11.6
7.4
14.0
11.8
11.4
12.5
14.8
23.2
12.1
12.3
18.3
29.2
25.9
2.0
29.2
26.5
20.8
10.4
2.0
29.2
12.2
Teff
Malapportionment: 'One person, one vote'
In studying the quality of representation in a country, one of the first questions asked is
how are the seats distributed to the population? Jordan's political system is quite unique in that
the seats in its popularly elected chamber, the House of Deputies, are not proportionally
distributed to the population. In fact, there is severe malapportionment in almost every district. In
addition, voters only get one vote in multi-member districts, a highly unusual system. While in
the United States districts are carved out, or gerrymandered, to give preference to a specific
voting group, in Jordan the districts vary widely in population, area, and district magnitude.
The idea of proportional representation electoral systems is that the vote of any two
citizens should be relatively equal. By dividing up the country's population, either into single
member districts or multi member districts, the seats in the legislature can be apportioned
accurately. In electoral systems with nationwide constituencies, like in Israel and the
Netherlands, malapportionment is impossible, as the voters choose parliamentarians that
represent the entire country, not regions. In the case of Jordan, however, the seats in the House of
Deputies are not apportioned according to population. Malapportionment is typically calculated
by finding the ratio of voters to seat share represented in each district.
Samuels and Snyder (2001) examine the level and characteristics of malapportioned
legislatures. Their comparative case study levels malapportionment across electoral systems,
and determines the correlation between malapportionment and country size, type of system, and
government structure (Samuels and Snyder 2001). They find that higher levels of
malapportionment tend to be in systems with single-member districts, and there are also higher
levels of malapportionment in African and Latin American countries.
There is no single method of calculating malapportionment, although many authors
discuss the effects of malapportionment in specific cases (see Norris 2004, Taagepera and
Shugart 1989). A simple calculation that provides consistent visualization of the concept is the
quotient of the proportion of the nationwide eligible voting population in the district and
proportion of seats assigned to the district.
P.
Si
Malapportionment: The ratio of the nationwide
population to its allocated seats in a district
(calculated with proportions)
For example, in 2003 in Jordan, 13.5% of Jordanian voters lived in Zarqa, which was
allocated 9.6% of the seats in the House of Deputies. In this case, malapportionment is
calculated to be 1.406 meaning that the ratio of the population to its parliamentary seats is 1.4 to
1. In the Ma'an Bedouin district, 1.2% of the Jordanian population is represented by 2.9% of the
parliament, giving Ma'an a malapportionment score of .432. This district is overrepresented
since the ratio is below zero.
Table 4-3 presents the percentage of seats and population at the governorate level, by
election year in Jordan. The governorates with very high percentages of the population (namely,
Amman, Irbid, and Zarqa) appear to be underrepresented, while governorates with small fractions
of the national population are consistently overrepresented.
Table 4-3: Governorate Malapportionment and Population Distribution
Governorate
Tafileh
Ma'an
P
1.60
2.27
1993
S
3.75
6.25
M
0.43
0.36
P
1.31
1.41
1997
S
3.75
3.75
M
0.35
0.38
P
1.51
1.50
2003
S
3.85
3.85
M
0.39
0.39
Aqaba
--
--
--
1.65
2.50
0.66
1.09
1.92
0.57
Ajloun
Mafraq
2.22
2.40
3.75
3.75
0.59
0.64
2.30
2.35
3.75
3.75
0.61
0.63
2.61
2.70
3.85
3.85
0.68
0.70
Madaba
--
--
--
2.50
3.75
0.67
2.61
3.85
0.68
Jerash
2.99
2.50
1.20
Bedouin
4.64
7.50
0.62
Karak
4.20
11.25
0.37
6.18
10.00
0.62
Balqa
7.50
2.08
Zarqa
15.61
Irbid
19.42
17.50
1.11
Amman
38.49
26.25
1.47
P and S are calculated in percentages (e.g.:
2.50% of parliamentary seats).
M is calculated by dividing P by S
3.00
2.50
1.20
3.78
7.50
0.50
3.98
11.25
0.35
0.68
6.81
10.00
15.46
7.50
2.06
18.07
17.50
1.03
37.39
22.50
1.66
1993 Jerash: 2.99% of the
2.61
3.85
4.05
8.66
4.39
9.62
7.26
9.62
13.49
9.62
18.58
15.39
37.61
22.12
voting population
0.68
0.47
0.46
0.75
1.40
1.21
1.70
and
Figure 4-1 shows histograms, by year, of the logarithm of district-level malapportionment
in Jordan. The level of malapportionment of each district is determined by the formula described
above. If the percentage of seats is equal to the percentage of the eligible population that lives in
that district, malapportionment is one. If a district receives more seats than its relative population
size, it is overrepresented in the House and is assigned as less than zero; if it has fewer seats than
the proportion of citizens, it is underrepresented and to the right of zero on the histogram. The ycoordinate is simply the number of districts that fall under that malapportionment score. Levels
of malapportionment vary widely each year, with the most overrepresented district in Karak in
1997 and the most underrepresented district being Amman's Second District.
Figure 4-1: Malapportionment in Jordan
Note: Vertical line at log(M)=0 indicates perfect apportionment
As is shown from these histograms, the districts in Jordan are not apportioned according
to population. In fact, before the redistricting in 2001, very few districts were actually properly
apportioned. When the redistricting occurred in 2001, the resulting electoral districts were either
only slightly overrepresented (as the greatest number of districts are found just below the "0" on
the scale) or very underrepresented. The large number of slightly overrepresented districts is
enough to compensate for the few highly underrepresented districts in Jordan.
Figure 4-2: Population Size and Malapportionment
Note: Horizontal line at log(M)=0 indicates perfect apportionment, diagonal line is regression line
The rural regions, specifically the Bedouin districts, Karak and Balqa are always
overrepresented in the House of Deputies. It is clear that not only are the most populated
governorates the most underrepresented, but also they have smaller land mass and generally
correspond to urban centers. Amman, the most underrepresented governorate in the parliament,
is the home of the nation's capital. Figure 4-2 displays the malapportionment in each district as a
function of voting population. The x-axis is the proportion of the nationwide voting population
that lives in the district, and the y-axis is the log of malapportionment. The log(M)=O line, which
is horizontal in this figure, is highlighted, and a regression line is fitted to the data for each year.
As the population goes up, malapportionment increases, for each election year. In 1993 and
1997 the districts have a much wider range proportions of population, going all the way to 15%
of the nationwide population (a district in Amman is the largest one). After redistricting, the
districts represent fewer people in the 2003 elections, but malapportionment is still present.
Table 4-4 displays the variables taken into consideration in regression models in the rest
of the analysis. I created a dummy variable for Year to use in analyses of IAF success (0 for 1993
and 1 for 2003). The other variables are log(M), P, IAF Seats, and a number of terms to measure
the interaction effect of several variables.
Table 4-4: Variables in Analysis for Jordan
Variable
log(M)
PopulationShare
Year Dummy
IAF Seats
log(M)*Y Interaction
Pop.*Y Interaction
log(M)*PInteraction
Turnout
Description
The ratio of population share to seat share in a given electoral district
The proportion of national population represented by one district
0 for 1993 election, 1 for 2003 election (used only in IAF regressions)
The proportion of Muslim seats the IAF won in a single district
The product of M and Y
The product of P and Y
The product of M and P
The proportion of eligible voters who voted
Table 4-5 displays the regression analysis that parallels Figure 4-2. This relationship
holds when the data is combined in a single regression as well as when it is broken down by each
election. As the population increases, malapportionment also increases. This relationship is
strong and significant. In 2003, P has the strongest effect, which is not immediately visible in
Figure 4-2.
Table 4-5: Regression Analysis of Population and Malapportionment
log(M)
PopulationShare
Constant
1993
9.967
(3.90)**
1997
11.569
(4.74)**
2003
20.135
(6.88)**
-0.619
-0.730
-0.695
(3.82)**
(4.81)**
(7.66)**
21
0.54
45
0.52
Observations 20
R-squared
0.46
Absolute value oft statistics in parentheses
* significant at 5%; ** significant at 1%
Religious and Ethnic minority representation
After determining that malapportionment in an electoral system exists, the next question
is how is this misrepresentation distributed among the population? While it is not possible to
determine the actual religious distribution in Jordan (the government does not collect this
information in its censuses), one can look to the seats in the parliament allocated to specific
minority groups to determine whether they are being disenfranchised systematically. The first
place to look for distinct patterns is through the ethnic and religious minorities present in the
country. The CIA World Factbook (2009) notes that Jordan's population is 98% Arab, 1%
Circassian, and 1% Armenian. In addition, it states that 92% of the population is Sunni Muslim,
6% is Christian, and 2% is Shi'a Muslim and Druze.
In a proportionally represented system the amount of seats that minorities receive should
be relatively proportional to their portion of the population. Usually, these seats are distributed on
a national level. In Jordan's system, each seat is assigned to a specific ethnicity or religion:
Muslim, Christian, and Circassian/Chechen, and so minority groups must field individual
candidates for each seat they seek. Every registered voter is allowed one vote- they can vote for
whomever they prefer, and do not need to vote for a candidate in their ethnic or religious group.
The top vote-getting candidates for each group then win those seats. The six women are chosen
from a nationwide list of all of the female candidates, and the first six candidates are elected to
office. For example, in Ajloun's First District there are two Muslim seats and one Christian seat.
The two Muslim candidates who win the most votes in the First District are assigned the two
Muslim seats, and the top vote-getting Christian candidate is assigned the Christian seat.
Table 4-6 displays the number of seats allotted to each religious or ethnic group, both by
absolute number and percentage of total seats, as compared to the "actual" percentages of each
group nationwide. The proportion of Muslim seats (without the female MPs) has decreased
slightly since the 2001 restructuring. The proportion of all groups has decreased as a result of
the women's quota, and since all of the women MPs have been Muslim, the proportion of
Muslim seats has gone up significantly. However, there is no guarantee that the female quota
will be filled by Muslims in all future elections. In addition, in 2007 a female candidate was
elected outside of the quota, a promising sign for Jordan and women's rights. At the national
level, there is an overrepresentation of minority groups. The Christians, especially receive a
much larger proportion of the seats in the House of Deputies than they would under a properly
apportioned system.
Table 4-6: Quotas and Minorities in Jordan
Group
Muslims
Christians
Circassians/Chechens
Total Population
Women
P (%)
93.00
6.00
1.00
100.00
47.62
1993
Seats
85.00
11.25
3.75
1997
Seats
85.00
11.25
3.75
2003
Seats
83.63
8.18
2.72
-
-
5.45
The Islamic Action Front andRepresentation
The data thus far has shown that Jordan's electoral system misrepresents its electorate.
Not only are the ethnic and religious minorities misrepresented on a national level, but also the
value of a person's vote varies widely depending on his location. While there are indications that
the urban areas are the most underrepresented in the parliament, is there more to this story than
simply regional affiliations?
There are other groups that malapportionment could be negatively impacting: religious
minorities, opponents to the Hashemites, or Palestinian-Jordanians. While I determined on a
national level that there is misrepresentation of religious and ethnic minorities inherent in the
House of Deputies structure, there is no district or governorate-level data available to test this
hypothesis further. Furthermore, there is no reliable data regarding the distribution of PalestinianJordanians in the country, and so it is impossible to measure the effect of malapportionment on
this group. It is also difficult to determine if it is the "opponents" of the Hashemites that are being
targeted through malapportionment: most public opinion polls find that a majority of Jordanians
are satisfied with Hashemite rule. These polls are nationwide and cannot be broken down to a
governorate or district-level analysis. In addition, the results of these polls indicate that either
Jordanians are satisfied with the current government, or that they cannot express feelings other
than support for the monarchy. Since the polls are typically conducted by a government-funded
research center, the latter conclusion may in fact be true. The structure of Jordan's political
environment also makes it difficult to measure the impact of any one particular group: there are
strict barriers to forming formal organizations, and few politicians are affiliated with a political
party.
As the only political organization that has been successfully winning seats in the lower
house, the Islamic Action Front represents the most formidable challenge to the Hashemite
loyalists in politics. Where has the IAF been successful in these three elections, and is there a
discernable trend in the way in which malapportionment and redistricting are done? Is the IAF
being systematically forced out of the political system? Members of the Muslim Brotherhood in
Jordan formed the IAF in 1992. It has fielded candidates since the 1993 elections, but boycotted
the parliamentary elections in 1997.
Figure 4-3: 1993 and 2003 Malapportionment and IAF Success
Note: Vertical line at log(M)=O indicates perfect apportionment, diagonal line is regression line.
Figure 4-3 displays the malapportionment histograms from Figure 4-1 with the IAF's seat
shares displayed as data points. The height of the bars represent the number of districts at that
malapportionment level, while the x-axis represents the difference between the percentage of
seats allotted to a district and the percentage of eligible voters in that same district. The points
represent districts in which the IAF won seats in that election, and is represented as a percentage
of the total seats in the district. In 1993, the IAF was successful in districts at many different
levels of malapportionment, but in 2003 the IAF's successes are not as widespread. In fact, most
of the IAF's seats were in districts that are very underrepresented in the House of Deputies. The
three districts in which the IAF won 100% of the seats had only one seat in play and there were
over ten candidates competing.
Is there a relationship between malapportionment and the proportion of seats the IAF
wins? The following figure plots the malapportionment of a district on the x-axis and the fraction
of seats in the district awarded to members of the IAF for both elections. I have displayed the
log(M)=O line (where the proportion of voters and seats are equivalent), and fitted a line to the
graph. I have also excluded any districts in which the IAF won no seats. There is a clear
relationship between the level of malapportionment and the success of the IAF: as a district
becomes more overrepresented, the IAF has less success. The three outliers are, again, the
districts in which there was one Muslim seat in play and the IAF won the single seat.
eiate IAF success as a function of Malannortionment
Note: Vertical line at log(M)=O indicates perfect apportionment, diagonal line is regression line.
Table 4-7 corresponds with the figure above and contains three models of regression
analysis: Model (1) tests the bivariate relationships between malapportionment and IAF seats,
which is significant at the .01 level. As malapportionment increases, the IAF wins 21% more of
the seats. Model (2) includes the Year dummy variable (0 for 1993, 1 for 2003). The effect of
malapportionment maintains its significance and loses some of its magnitude, while the year
dummy variable has a negative impact on IAF success- the IAF is more likely to win seats in
1993 than 2003 (since the IAF won more seats in 1993 than 2003, the results are accounted for).
Finally, in Model (3), I introduce an interaction term that is created by multiplying
malapportionment by the year dummy. In this model, the effect of malapportionment on IAF
seats is stronger than in Model (1), but slightly less significant. The year dummy variable still
has a negative impact on IAF seats, but is less strong, while the M-Y interaction term accounts
for the loss of strength in the year dummy variable.
Table 4-7: IAF Seats and Malapportionment
IAF Seats
(1)
log(M)
(2)
(3)
0.207
0.203
0.218
(3.97)**
(3.86)**
(2.21)*
-0.051
(0.75)
-0.054
(0.77)
-0.021
Year dummy
log(M) *Year
Constant
0.228
0.262
(6.93)**
(4.64)**
Observations 65
65
R-squared 0.20
0.21
Absolute value of t statistics in parentheses
(0.18)
0.264
(4.57)**
65
0.21
* significant at 5%; ** significant at 1%
As I have already demonstrated that the largest districts in terms of population are also
the most underrepresented in the House of Deputies, and with this most recent result relating
malapportionment and IAF success, is there also a relationship between how well the IAF does
in an election and how large the district is?
In Figure 4-5 I have plotted the proportion of eligible voters in the district against the
percentage of seats that the IAF wins in the 1993 and 2003 elections. I have included those
districts that the IAF represented in the House of Deputies in this plot to show what types of
districts do not vote for the IAF. It is clear that the small districts do not choose the IAF while the
largest districts do. It is not possible to compare the losing candidates' vote shares with those of
the winners. However, even with this limited dataset, the relationship is quite clear: the most
populated districts vote for, and are represented by, the IAF. The smallest districts, which are
also the overrepresented districts in the House of Deputies, do not vote for the IAF.
Figure 4-5: Population and IAF Success
Note: Diagonal line is regression line.
Table 4-8 displays the regression analysis to match Figure 4-5. I created three models to
examine the interaction between population size and the IAF's proportion of seats. In all of the
models, the population coefficient is large and significant. Model (1) is the univariate analysis
with just the population proportion regressed against IAF seat proportion. Model (2) introduces
the Year dummy variable, which results in a larger coefficient for P. For Model (3), I created a
term to account for the interaction between population size and year dummy variable, which
lowered the value of the population coefficient while maintaining significance and improving the
overall fit to the data (the R-squared term increased from .24 to .25).
Table 4-8: Population Regressi on Analysis
PopulationShare
Year dummy
(1)
4.339
(4.42)**
IAF Seats
(z
4.665
(4.31)
0.053
(0.73)
P*Year
Constant
0.051
0.005
(1.20)
(0.06)
Observations 65
65
R-squared 0.24
0.24
Absolute value of t statistics in parentheses
* significant at 5%; ** significant at 1%
I
(3)
(3)
4.0 65
(2.87)**
0.0()3
(0.03)
1.466
(0.66)
0.035
(0.39)
65
0.25
In the regression analysis in Table 4-9, I designed five models to examine the combined
effect of population size and malapportionment on IAF success. In Model (1) I simply examine
the relative effect of malapportionment and population on the proportion of seats won by the
IAF. Population has a much stronger, and more significant effect than malapportionment. In
Model (2), I include the Year dummy variable, which reduces the strength of population,
decreases the size of malapportionment's effect, and increases the size of the population
coefficient. In both Models (3) and (4), there is less significance as well as smaller coefficients.
In Model (5), I include only the M-P interaction term, which results in larger coefficients but not
as strong significance as compared to Models (1) and (2).
Table 4-9: Multivariate regression an alysis on IAF success
---
IAF Seats
log(M)
PopulationShare
Year dummy
(1)
0.105
(1.59)
3.026
(2.38)*
(2)
0.099
(1.45)
3.265
(2.26)*
0.026
(0.36)
log(M) *Year
(3)
0.058
(0.44)
3.487
(4)
-0.064
(0.38)
2.544
(1.81)+
(1.21)
0.044
(0.31)
0.053
(0.33)
0.049
(0.34)
0.146
(0.82)
-0.182
(0.06)
0.071
(0.58)
65
0.27
2.626
(1.11)
-0.609
(0.19)
0.079
(0.65)
65
0.29
log(M)*P
P*Year
Constant
0.114
0.087
(0.91)
(1.97)+
Observations 65
65
R-squared
0.27
0.27
Absolute value of t statistics in parentheses
+ significant at 10%; * significant at 5%; ** significant at 1%
~(5)
0.070
(0.89)
2.491
(1.40)
0.009
(0.12)
1.491
(0.75)
0.108
(1.09)
65
0.28
Both malapportionment and population size have substantial individual effects on the
proportion of IAF seats. The IAF is most successful in the most underrepresented districts, which
are also the districts with the largest populations. Unfortunately it is impossible to test this
relationship with unsuccessful IAF candidates, as the data is not available. A next step is
examining the effect of malapportionment on the 2007 IAF results.
The 2007 Elections and the IAF: DeliberateManipulation or Bad Luck?
While the turnout and population information for the November 2007 elections has not
yet been published, the results for the winning candidates are available. Both the IAF and the rest
of the politicians in Jordan were surprised when the IAF won record-low 6 seats in the House of
Deputies in the November 2007 elections. Since the district malapportionment has changed over
time and the IAF has been successful in the past, is there a relationship between those districts in
which the IAF was successful in 2007 and the change in representation between 1993 and 2003?
By using those districts in which the IAF was successful as focus points, I can follow the
redistricting over time. The following figure is the malapportionment histograms from the past
three elections reprinted. The data points on each histogram represent the percentage of seats the
IAF won in 2007, by district. As is clear from Figure 4-6 the IAF won in 2007 in the districts that
have been systematically underrepresented in the House of Deputies over time. In 1993 and
1997, three of these districts were overrepresented and three of these districts were
underrepresented in the House of Deputies.
The 2001 redistricting that resulted in the shifting of three of the IAF-winning districts to
become among the few severely underrepresented districts in 2003. The other three districts are
among the "slightly overrepresented" districts in 2003. These results provide evidence to
support the hypothesis that malapportionment and the 2001 redistricting influenced the IAF's
disappointing outcome in the 2007 elections. It could, of course, be a stronger case if the results
from the losing candidates were available to include in this analysis.
Figure 4-6: 1993- 2003 Malapportionment and 2007 IAF results
Note: Vertical line at log(M)=0 indicates perfect apportionment, diagonal line is regression line.
Malapportionmentand Participation
There has been widespread malapportionment in Jordan's electoral system since 1993,
although more recently fewer districts have been severely overrepresented in the House of
Deputies. The extent to which some districts have been underrepresented has remained fairly
constant. There is strong evidence that this malapportionment has affected the results of the
Islamic Action Front, the only true political party in Jordan. In addition, the IAF has been the
most successful in the districts with the largest populations and the most malapportioned,
suggesting that the mechanisms were meant to control the growth of competitive parties like the
Islamic Action Front. Have there been other consequences for representation? Because of the
wide variation in turnout cited by many, I look to turnout in Jordan's parliamentary elections for
evidence. Is there a relationship between malapportionment turnout rates across the country?
Figure 4-7 is a plot of the level of malapportionment of a district on the x-axis and the
turnout rate for that district on the y-axis. I have displayed the results for each year with a fitted
line to match the results. There is a clear relationship between malapportionment and turnout:
the more overrepresented a district is, the more likely that district will turn out at high rates; the
same holds for the underrepresented districts: the more underrepresented a district is, the more
likely its eligible citizens will not vote.
Figure 4-7: Malapportionment and Turnout in Jordan's elections
Note: Vertical line at log(M)=O indicates perfect apportionment, diagonal line is regression line.
The relationship between representation and malapportionment becomes stronger after
redistricting in 2001: while overrepresented districts are given only a slight advantage
individually, the underrepresented districts remain very underrepresented and the turnout rate
follows the same pattern as for other years. The more underrepresented a district is, the less
likely its voters will participate in the parliamentary elections.
The following figure plots the proportion of the national population in a district against
that district's Election Day turnout. I have also fitted a line to each of these figures, and a
powerful trend occurs. As the population grows, participation is likely to decrease. The smallest
districts, which are also the most overrepresented districts, vote at the highest rates, while the
largest districts (also the most underrepresented districts), vote at very low rates.
and Drooortion of Jordan's
Note: Diagonal line is regression line.
Table 4-10 provides the regression analysis for the combined effect of M and P on
turnout. The R-squared terms are large for all the models, and there is a great deal of
significance for M in all years and P in 1997 and 2003. The regression model including both M
and P fits the data than the individual regressions.
Table 4-10: Explaining the Variation in Turnout
Turnout
1993
log(M)
PopulationShare
-0.156
1997
-0.136
-0.075
(2.34)*
(1.78)+
(2.18)*
-1.043
-1.445
-3.801
(1.34)
(1.45)
-0.185
-0.084
(0.18)
(0.07)
Constant
0.538
0.563
(12.50)**
(9.82)**
Observations 20
21
R-squared
0.73
0.64
Absolute value of t statistics in parentheses
log(M)*P
2003
(3.38)**
-0.572
(0.40)
0.780
(27.16)**
45
0.72
+ significant at 10%; * significant at 5%; ** significant at 1%
Conclusions
Even with just the winning candidates' information from three of Jordan's elections,
there are several clear conclusions. First, there is widespread malapportionment in Jordan's
system. While the 2001 redistricting did reduce the number and degree of overrepresentation
present in the 1990s, it also maintained the standard of underrepresentation for the urban, densely
populated districts. There is also clear evidence that malapportionment has played a significant
role in inhibiting the ability of the IAF to secure its seats, even in districts it may have once
considered "safe." The IAF has been the most successful in the larger, and thus severely
malapportioned, districts. As a result of constant underrepresentation and with the help of the
single non-transferable voting system, the IAF's seat share has decreased significantly over time.
The results from this analysis also point to a byproduct of malapportionment: turnout
suffers when malapportionment is high. Poor turnout rates in the largest districts may also be
contributing to the failure of the IAF to win seats in its "safe" districts: When fewer IAF
supporters go to the polls in the large districts, the IAF will not win seats.
Figure 4-9 shows the variables that affect representation. Malapportionment influences
turnout, representation, and IAF success. If the districts in which the IAF won seats were
apportioned according to population, the IAF would have won more seats. A high level of
malapportionment results in a great deal of disproportionality between the population size and the
resulting seat share a district receives in the legislature; malapportionment also results in a low
turnout in the underrepresented districts and high turnout in the overrepresented districts; finally,
malapportionment affects the accuracy of representation in the House of Deputies: not only are
ethnic and religious minorities not apportioned according to population, but also seats are not
apportioned according to population size. Because of this, a significant number of Jordanians'
voices are unheard.
Figure 4-9: Causal Relationship of Targeted Mechanisms
IAF success
Malapportionment
Turnout
Representation
The Islamic Action Front, the only organized political party in Jordan, is being driven
out of the political system. The districts in which the IAF was successful in 1993 are so
malapportioned today that the IAF can no longer be successful in legislative races. The 2003
election results show that the IAF was less successful in its 1993 strongholds, and that the places
in which it did win seats also were those districts that are so underrepresented in parliament that
the IAF's power was severely diminished. Indeed, the 2007 elections results show that the IAF
is no longer the formidable opponent it once was. The data indicates that the IAF's failure is not
necessarily due to the political climate or IAF strategies, but more than likely to the electoral
system itself.
Chapter 5
Turkey's Struggle with Democracy
This chapter provides an account of Turkey's history since its independence in 1923. I
examine the underlying ethnic and political divisions that Turkey has struggled with- the Turks
and the Kurds and secular versus Islamic visions of the state. After discussing the history of
Turkey and its current situation today, I provide background on the evolution of political parties
in Turkey and the electoral system, and discuss the literature related to elections in Turkey. The
majority of the literature focused on Turkey has emphasized the recent rise of the Islamist
political movement and related this movement to Turkey's position in the world, its influence on
Turkish feminists, and domestic relations with its ethnic minorities. While the abnormally high
election threshold that was installed with Turkey's most recent military coup in 1980 (the third
of its kind since 1960) provokes questions among scholars as to its effect on the transformation
of votes into seats, scholarship on Turkey has not measured this disproportionality.
The Ethnic and Religious Divides
The Republic of Turkey is located in the Anatolian peninsula, and its landmass borders
southeastern Europe, Asia, and Iraq and Syria in the south. A democratic state since 1923,
Turkey also has a strong history of secular government. Since its independence, Turkey has
become more integrated with the West, by joining NATO, OECD, and is in the process of
becoming a full member of the European Union.
Turkey has a great deal of ethnic diversity, but only three groups are officially recognized
minorities: Armenians, Greeks, and Jews. The Kurds, according to CIA Factbook, are the largest
ethnic minority, but precise proportions of all of these groups are not available. Several sources
say Kurds make up between 12 and 20% of the total population of Turkey (Gurr and Hoff 2001
pp. 40; Esmer and Sayari 2002 pp. 139; CIA World Factbook). The focus of ethnic conflict in
Turkey is on the situation of the ethnic Kurds who are citizens of Turkey. While at Turkey's
independence, these ethnic groups were concentrated in specific regions of the country, today
that segregation no longer exists, and the various groups live side-by-side both in urban and rural
areas.
The Kurds have significant populations in Turkey, Iran, and Iraq, and frequently a
comparison of the Kurds' situation in each of these countries is used to elucidate the precarious
position of the Kurdish Turks. Kurdish nationalism has a foundation based on several shared
characteristics, including origin, location, culture, religion, and language. For many centuries the
Kurds resisted attempts by outsiders (including Turks, Persians, and Arabs) to conquer their land
and people. However, the Kurds ultimately failed to stop the Ottoman Empire from imposing
outside rule on them for two reasons: traditional Kurdish leaders fought one-on-one against the
Ottomans, instead of organizing politically, which could have enabled them to hold onto longterm support for autonomy; Ottoman and Persian rulers saw the tribal divisions among the
Kurds, took advantage of these differences, and coordinated with each other to defeat the Kurds
(Gurr and Hoff 2001 pp. 42). More recently, the socioeconomic interests of individual Kurds
have diverged: until the
2 0th
century all Kurds were mountain-dwelling pastoralists, whereas
today Kurds are farmers, as well as professionals and merchants.
In addition, the Turkish Kurds are much more physically dispersed today than they were
through the 19th century: when Turkey declared independence, most Kurds lived in the
southeastern provinces near Iran and Iraq, but today, the majority of Kurds are dispersed
throughout the country (Esmer and Sayari 2002 pp. 139). With large populations in Iraq, Iran,
and Armenia in addition to Turkey, the Kurds cannot organize as a single nationalist movement.
Differing policies in each of these countries on the status of the Kurds also inhibits them from
having a single movement.
While the ethnic cleavages in Turkey are a looming political issue, especially with regard
to the Kurds and their nationalistic tendencies, the battle between secularism and Islamist politics
is played out in the political arena on a daily basis. Although almost all Turks are Muslim, there
is a struggle in both the Turkish elite and general population over the role of religion in
government (CIA World Factbook 2008). Turkey was founded as a secular state, and there are
numerous citations throughout the Constitution that support this foundation (Constitution of the
Republic of Turkey). It upholds the right to religious freedom and worship, but Turkey also has
laws prohibiting religious practicing in public, women from wearing headscarves, and men from
wearing religious clothing in government buildings (BBC Online 2008).
From the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish State: a brief history
The evolution of the Turkish state since independence can be summarized in the
following way: experiments with democracy punctuated by military coups. The military coups in
1960 and 1980 served to realign the polity and redesign the electoral system. However, a few
elements have been consistent throughout Turkey's experience: a strong party system, a strict
separation of church and state, and a national policy of refusing to acknowledge Kurdish
nationalism as a legitimate political movement. When it appeared as though Turkey's politics
was straying from the centralized, secular state of Mustafa Kemal, the military stepped in to
refocus the country on his vision. Since the 1970s, the Constitutional Court has supplemented the
military's actions by determining which interests are represented in politics.
The declaration of independence and creation of the Turkish state in 1923 were
precipitated by the fall of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. In order to gain support from
the Kurdish population living within the new state's borders, Mustafa Kemal used Sunni Islam to
unite the Kurds with the Turks as one state. While in the early years of Turkish independence he
took strides to offer the Kurds autonomy and protect their nationality, ultimately in 1919 Kemal
reverted back to a policy of strict Turkish nationality and began arresting Kurds who tried to
promote Kurdish nationalism (Natali 2005). When Kemal ultimately became president of
Turkey, he worked toward unification of the country under a secular state based on a singular
Turkish nationality. Immediately Kurds lost all claims to their Kurdish identity, and Kemal's
talks regarding a federal state for Kurds ended (Natali 2005). The Turkish state used a "divide
and rule" policy to ensure unification of the Kurds with the Turkish state, and its focus of
national politics on secularism versus Islam further fractured the Kurdish people. The Kurds'
response, instead of peacefully approaching Turkish politics as a political organization lobbying
for rights, was violent and dispersed (Natali 2005).
After World War II (in which Turkey fought on the side of the Allies), Turkey became a
charter member of the United Nations. Since that time it has also maintained a close relationship
with its Western European neighbors. Turkey has been lobbying to become a member of the
European Union, and was an associate member of its predecessor, the Council of Europe. In
2005, it began accession negotiations with the EU; it is expected that this process take 15 years,
due to the slow pace in which reforms are brought about. The United States, in its efforts to
combat communism, declared the Truman Doctrine in 1947, which obligated the U.S. to provide
large-scale military and economic support to both Turkey and Greece. Since that time, Turkey
and the United States have been close allies. Turkey joined the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization in 1952; in an attempt to halt the spread of communism into the Mediterranean
region, it intervened in the 1974 Greek military coup and established the Turkish Republic of
Northern Cyprus (TRNC). Turkey is the only country to recognize the TRNC.
Turkey has another controversial policy regarding recognition: that of the Armenian
Genocide, a period at the end of the Ottoman Empire's rule in which hundreds of thousands of
Armenians were expelled and killed from the Empire. Turkey does not accept the use of the term
"genocide," while many countries, including France, Italy, Switzerland, and Russia, and most
genocide scholars do.
Turkey has a troubled history with recognition: from the Kurdish identity to Cyprus to the
Armenian genocide, there seems to be a tendency for the Turkish state to rely on its secular,
unified conception of identity and ignore the pursuit of other groups' autonomy leave them with
no choice but to resort to violence. The example of the Kurds in Turkey is an excellent example:
Kurds have not been permitted to organize politically, practice their ethnic heritage, or speak
Kurdish publicly. These policies may soon be changing- this be discussed in greater detail later.
Elections in Turkey
A one-party (the Republican People's Party, or CHP) authoritarian regime governed
Turkey during the early years. After World War II, Turkey introduced a majority-rule, multiparty system; the CHP, however, and its offshoot, the Democrat Party (DP, formed from
dissident parliamentarians when the CHP introduced political liberalization) remained in power.
These two parties won almost 90% of the vote in the 1950, 1954, and 1957 elections, which
translated into 98% of the seats (Esmer and Sayari 2002). Throughout this time, political debate
was centered on the struggle between the supporters of a strong, centralized secular government
and those who advocated for a decentralized government coupled with a privatized economy and
a looser interpretation of secularism (Esmer and Sayari 2002). The DP held the majority of seats
in the parliament during the 1950s, and its combined victory with the CHP prevented the
opposition parties from winning significant portions of seats. As a result, there was no turnover,
and the only debates between the DP and the CHP were not about ideology (as the two parties
held very similar political stances) but about the practice of democracy in Turkey.
These debates escalated, and in 1960, in response to student protests and the political
crisis, the military staged a coup and removed the elected government (led by the Prime Minister
Menderes and his DP) from power. After a year and a half of military rule, power was returned
to the people. In the aftermath of the 1960 coup, the DP and its leadership were banned from
politics. In addition, the electoral system was changed from a majority-rule system to
proportional representation (PR).
The introduction of a PR system to Turkey catalyzed the creation of new political parties
that broke off from the original political parties, the CHP and DP. During the period between
1961 and 1970, political debate was focused on the class system, instead of the battle over
secularism and centralized government (Esmer and Sayari 2002). The introduction of a PR
system also brought Turkey first experiences with coalition governments.
Political debates focused on secular Turkish nationalism continued through the 1960s.
The new electoral system increased party fragmentation, which also led to the rise of Islamist
political parties. While it permitted Islam to take a role in public life (through the construction of
government-sponsored mosques and creation of active Islamist political parties), the government
remained silent on the status of ethnic Kurds. Between 1961 and 1980, the CHP and the Adalet
Partisi (AP) were the dominant forces in Turkish politics, with the CHP the strongest in the early
1960s and 1970s, and the AP in that position in the late 1960s. The increased fragmentation of
the party system also brought a wider spectrum of political ideology to Turkish politics. Esmer
and Sayari (2002 pp. 14) attributes this trend to both domestic and international factors: the 1961
constitution was more liberal than the previous constitution and Cold War politics fueled both
anti-American and anti-Soviet feelings. These factors lead to the rise of new left-wing parties,
and the shift of the AP to the right. The late 1970s also saw economic crisis in Turkey, which
fueled political violence and a growing unwillingness between the AP and the CHP to coordinate
a response toward radical parties (Esmer and Sayari 2002 pp. 15). The violence that ensued
during this time was unprecedented: a death toll estimated at 5000, over 3000 fascist attacks in
1978 alone, and 10 assassinations every day.
This growth in violence and economic problems caused the military to intervene again in
1980 and remove the elected officials from power. In addition to abolishing the Parliament, the
military extended martial law across the entire country, suspended the Constitution, and banned
all existing political parties and trade unions.
In anticipation of the return of elections, the military choreographed the recreation of
political parties. The military projected that the Milliyet9i Demokrasi Partisi (MDP, or
Nationalist Democracy Party), organized by a retiring general, would become the governing
party. The military also approved the Anavatan Partisi (ANAP, or Motherland Party), but did
not expect it to be successful. Finally, the military permitted the Halkgi Parti (HaP, or Populist
Party) to participate, with the expectation that it would act as the MDP's main opposition (Esmer
and Sayari 2002 pp. 16).
The military wrote a new Constitution, which outlined citizenship, freedoms, and the
powers of the parliament, judiciary, and the president, and national security. The official
language is Turkish, and the Constitution defines the Turkish identity as "everyone bound to the
Turkish state through the bond of citizenship" (Article 66, Constitution of the Republic of
Turkey). The Constitution also discusses the elections of the Turkish Grand National Assembly.
Only the parliament has the power to enact laws and ratify treaties, while both the government
and the parliament can propose laws. The Grand National Assembly has 550 members today,
each elected to a four-year term (shortened in 2007 from five-year terms), divided among its 81
provinces.
In addition to the PR party-list system that was reintroduced, a 10% national threshold as
was installed. In order for a party to receive any seats, it would have to win 10% of the national
vote as well as win enough support in individual districts. These constraints on political
competition coupled with the Turkish government's longstanding ignorance to ethnicities other
than Turkish served to further impede the ability of ethnic groups to organize as legal political
parties or organizations.
Several new parties entered politics in anticipation of the 1987 elections, causing further
fragmentation of the political system. In an effort to prevent ANAP from winning a plurality of
seats again, the military also instituted a district level threshold that parties were required to
exceed in order to win seats (Esmer and Sayari 2002 pp. 61-63). If the district magnitude (DM)
was 4, the party needed to win at least 25% of the votes in the district to be awarded a seat. This
strategy ultimately failed, and ANAP increased its margin of victory; ANAP repealed this law in
anticipation of the 1991 elections. Many of the "new" parties were formed from remnants of pre1980 parties: instead of the leadership of these parties retiring, they were dormant between 1980
and 1987 (Esmer and Sayari 2002 pp. 17). The 1980s were characterized by the rise of ANAP,
which benefited in 1983 by the ban on pre-1980 parties and maintained this majority into the
1987 elections.
The 1990s came with even greater fragmentation to the party system in Turkey. This
fragmentation led to the first successful campaign for an Islamist party, the RP. In addition to
the entrance of religious parties to political contests, a pro-Kurdish party entered elections. The
Halkin Demokrasi Partisi (People's Democracy Party, or HADEP) was very successful in
individual provinces, but did not garner enough nationwide votes to win seats in the parliament
(it won 4.5% of the nationwide vote, missing the 10% threshold considerably).
Party fragmentation also introduced Turkey to the practice of coalition governments.
When in the 1995 and 1999 elections no party won a majority of the seats, the successful parties
were forced to build coalitions (which weren't necessarily successful). In 1997, the Prime
Minister (a member of the RP) of the coalition between the RP and DYP was asked to resign
from power; the Constitutional Court banned the RP shortly after this. The coalition formed
from the victorious parties in 1999 was more effective in creating human rights legislation and
instituting economic reforms. In 2002, the Justice and Development Party (AKP), a
reincarnation of previous Islamist parties, succeeded in capturing a majority of the seats in the
parliament. Besides bringing to power an Islamist party, this election was also groundbreaking in
that only one other political party, the CHP, reached the 10% national threshold. It signified the
collapse of centrist politics in Turkey, which had dominated the political sphere prior to 2002
(Carkoglu and Kalaycioglu 2007 pp. 28). While the AKP maintained its majority control of the
parliament in the 2007 elections, the CHP and the MHP also were able to surpass the threshold.
Qarkoglu and Kalaycioglu (2007 pp. 43) note that there is a high correlation between
electoral support for an incumbent party and economic performance, finding that strong
economic performance leads to vote share improvements for the incumbent party. Another issue
that is frequently discussed with regards to Turkey's elections is its bid to become a member of
the European Union. Qarkoglu and Kalaycioglu (2007 pp. 50-51) point out that the abolition of
the death penalty was approved by the parliament shortly before elections, but find that voters
did not rank EU membership and foreign policy as a high priority in surveys. The economy
proved to be a more popular answer in these surveys. In the 2002 elections, worries about a war
in Iraq also topped voters' considerations.
Governance
In the following section, I discuss the separation of powers in Turkey's government.
Historical evidence points to the blurring of lines between the military and elected officials,
which typically have large barriers between them in democracies.
The President of the Republic, who is elected to a five-year term through direct elections,
heads the state of Turkey. Executive power, however, does not rest with the President, but with
the Prime Minister and the Council of Ministers. The Grand National Assembly of Turkey holds
the legislative power in the government, and the independent judicial power rests with the
Constitutional Court. The Prime Minister is elected by the parliament, and usually results in the
election of the head of the majority or plurality party. Universal suffrage is awarded to citizens
18 years or older.
The military has demonstrated its willingness to respond to any perceived threats to the
secular, nationalistic foundations of the Turkish state, domestic or otherwise. While the chief
purpose of the military is to defend Turkey and her allies against foreign threats (through
membership in NATO), it has also been engaged with the separatist terrorist organization
Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). The Turkish military has frequently extended its fighting with
the PKK into northern Iraq. Bolstered by U.S. aid in the late 1980s, the military began
undergoing modernization, which continues to this day.
The Constitutional Court rules on the constitutionality of laws and the conformity of
political parties to the concept of a unitary, secular state. Challenges to a law must be brought to
the Court within 2 months of enactment. It was established in 1962 from provisions in the 1961
constitution. There are 11 regular members of the Constitutional Court and 4 substitute
members. The President selects the members from the Council of State, the Military Court of
Cassation, the High Military Administrative Court of Appeals, the Court of Accounts, and the
Higher Education Council. The Court continued operating in the wake of the 1980 military
coup, and its functions were included in the new 1982 constitution. It has been the deciding
factor in many controversial policies, including examining the legality of many political parties
and laws governing religious practice.
Throughout Turkey's history with democratically elected governments, its Constitutional
Court has been active in enforcing the strict political parties laws. It has banned many political
parties, including a large number that it deemed religious-oriented (which violates the laws
governing political parties) as well as pro-Kurdish parties like the Democratic People's Party
(HADEP) (BBC News 2003). Most recently, the Constitutional Court reviewed the leading party
in the government, the AKP (Justice and Development Party), to determine if it was in violation
of the political parties law. In a surprising decision, the Court did not vote to ban the party (it
was one vote shy of the seven vote requirement) (Economist 2008).
Because of the Constitutional Court's role in determining which parties are permitted to
rule, a review of studies on it is necessary as well. The prevalence of constitutional courts in
European states increased dramatically after the end of World War II. Epstein, Knight and
Shvetsova (2001) examine the role of these courts in democracies and propose a model to
explain strategy behind Court decisions. Judicial power has been expanding in democracies all
over the world, but this is especially true in Eastern Europe (Epstein, Knight and Shvetsova
2001). The United States Court system was the first of its kind to deal with issues of
constitutionality, but many countries do not use it as the model when designing their own
Constitutional Courts.
I have replicated Epstein, Knight and Shvetsova's (2001) model below in Table 5-1 and
added an additional column describing the Constitutional Court system in Turkey. There are
four characteristics of Constitutional Courts: institutional structure, timing, type, and standing
(Epstein, Knight and Shvetsova 2001). The individual properties of the courts in each country
vary greatly and have a significant impact on the breadth and direction of power that
Constitutional Courts can have. The structure in Turkey is highly centralized, establishing that
issues of constitutionality can only be brought to a single court, and only government officials
(the President or majority and main opposition party) can bring issues to the court. For cases of
political party closure, only members of the party with the largest membership in the Grand
National Assembly can request a case. While in the United States the right of review and source
of cases is diffuse across all levels of U.S. courts, citizens, and government officials, the design
in Turkey is quite different. The Court appears to effectively be an extension of power of the
majority party, which for several decades was the party of the military regime.
Table 5-1: Constitutional Court Design across democracies
(Epstein, Knight and Shvetsova 2001, Constitution of Turkey)
Characteristics
American System
European System
Turkish System
Institutional
Structure (Who
has the power to
engage in judicial
review?)
Diffused. Ordinary courts
can engage in judicial
review; that is, they can
declare an act
unconstitutional.
Centralized. Only a single court
(usually called a "constitutional
court") can exercise judicial review;
other courts are typically barred from
so doing, though they may refer
constitutional questions to the
constitutional court.
Centralized
Timing (When
can judicial
review occur?)
A Posteriori (sometimes
called Ex Post). Courts
can only exercise judicial
review after an act has
occurred or taken effect.
A Priori (sometimes called Ex Ante)
and A Posteriori. Many constitutional
courts have a priori review over
treaties; some have a priori review
over governmental acts; others have
both a priori and a posteriori review,
while still others have either but not
both.
Both A Priori and A
Posteriori review. A
challenge to a law must be
brought within 2 months of
its promulgation.
Type (Can
judicial review
take place in the
absence of a real
case or
controversy?)
Concrete Review. Courts
can resolve only real cases
or controversies.
Abstract and Concrete Review. Most
constitutional courts can exercise
review in the absence of a real case or
controversy; many can exercise
concrete review as well.
Concrete review
Standing (Who
can initiate
disputes?)
Litigants, engaged in a
real case or controversy
that have a personal and
real stake in the outcome
can bring suit.
The range can be broad, from
governmental actors (including
executives and members of the
legislature) to individual citizens.
President, members of
majority or major opposition
party in Grand National
Assembly (minimum of 1/5
of Assembly). Party with the
most members in the
Assembly can apply for
another party's closure.
In 2008, the Constitutional Court banned the introduction of constitutional amendments
that would have permitted women to wear headscarves in universities (Human Rights Watch
2008). The ruling AKP party made campaign promises during the 2007 elections to revise the
Constitution to allow for improved human rights and to permit freedom of expression, especially
with regards to religion. The CHP and the DSP responded to the amendments that the AKP
proposed by applying to the Constitutional Court for their annulment, alleging that these
amendments violated the principle of secularism.
The Constitutional Court has banned several political parties throughout its 50-year
history. This includes the Marxist Workers Party of Turkey (TIP), the secessionist People's
Democracy Party (HDP), the right-wing Welfare Party (RP), and the right-wing Virtue Party
(FP). Most banned parties were found to be pro-Islamist or pro-Kurdish. According to the
Constitutional Court, in all of these cases the party's ideology was found to be in conflict with
the secular foundation of the Turkish state. The last two parties, the RP and FP, were banned
because of their religious ideology.
The most recent case related to political parties that the Constitutional Court heard was in
2008. The AKP, which held a majority of the parliament's seats, was the first party with a
majority of seats to be brought before the Court for closure. There were 4 different conclusions
the Court could have reached: dismissal, imposition of a financial penalty, to ban the AKP but
not the individual members, or to ban the AKP as well as its members (BBC News 2008).
Ultimately, the ban did not garner enough votes (it needed seven votes) to come into effect, and
instead the Court fined the AKP for anti-secularist activities (Telegraph 2008).
The 2008 trial of the AKP brought concern among EU observers that Turkey's bid to
become a full member was in jeopardy. If the Constitutional Court had voted to ban the AKP, it
would have posed problems for Turkey to reach the EU standards of democratic governments.
Since the Constitutional Court's bans of the RP and FP in 1998 and 2001, respectively, several
constitutional amendments to increase the difficulty of banning political parties have been
enacted. In addition, Prime Minister Erdogan's (the leader of the AKP) policies since he entered
office in 2002 have tested the will of the historically proactive military: on several occasions
Erdogan has withstood the pressure from the military establishment to back down on some of his
politically conservative policies. Since entering office in 2002, Erdogan has pursued relations
with Iran and Sudan, while increasing its criticism of Israel, both risky moves considering the
nature of most of its alliances. Turkey has also made strides its conflict with the separatist Kurds
since the rise of the AKP, launching its first Kurdish-language channel and also pursuing the
installment of Kurdish literature departments in its public universities. At the same time,
however, the AKP remains very popular among Turks. Political opponents, in fact, are so
threatened by the AKP's popularity that they have begun turning their own political agenda on
its head: the CHP has begun calling for the Kurdish new year to be declared a national holiday
and reaching out to female politicians who wear headscarves (Economist 2009).
100
Figure 5-1: Turkey's Administrative Divisions
The Evolution of the PartySystem
Since 1960, dozens of parties have participated in elections, and many of them have
succeeded in winning seats the Parliament. While the number of parties has fluctuated over
time, several parties have been present in some form in Turkey's political system. At first
glance, it appears as though these parties have no connection to each other; a closer examination
shows, however, that a number of parties have roots in earlier parties, especially those that were
banned at some point. Party leaders choose new names and new platforms, but the essential
elements of these parties remain the same.
101
Political parties have a long history in Turkey; from independence in 1923 through 1946,
the CHP (the Republican People's Party) was the incumbent in Turkey's one-party regime.
After adopting a majority-rule multi-party system in 1946, the DP (Democrat Party) held control
until 1960. In 1961, Turkey again changed its electoral system and adopted a proportional
representation (PR) system: many new parties were created from the older CHP and DP. During
the 1980 coup the military, in addition to restructuring the electoral system and constitution,
banned all existing political parties and took responsibility for approving political parties to
participate in the post-coup system. As a result, only three parties were permitted to participate
in the 1983 elections. These three parties did not have roots in pre-coup parties, but many of the
parties that participated in later elections did.
Table 5-2 summarizes the major parties that have been active in Turkish politics since
1961. Only those parties that won seats in at least 2 consecutive elections or were banned by the
Constitutional Court are included; there are many more parties that have been active in Turkish
politics. I have included the Turkish name with the English translation, their affiliation (center,
left, right, Islamist, Kurdish), connections to other parties or groups, and the years in which they
were active. Throughout my analysis I use the acronyms.
102
Table 5-2: Turkey's Political Parties
Party
CKMP
AP
CHP
MHP
GP
CGP
DP
MSP
ANAP
MDP
HP
DYP
SHP
DSP
RP
HADEP
FP
AKP
Full Name (English)
Cumhuriyet9i K6ylii Millet Partisi
(Republican Peasant Nation Party)
Adalay Partesi
(Justice Party)
Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi
(Republican People's Party)
Milliyet9i Hareket Partisi
(Nationalist Action Party)
Gilven Partisi
(Reliance Party)
Cumhuriyetgi Gilven Partisi
(Republican Reliance Party)
Demokrat Parti
(Democrat Party)
Milli Selamet Partisi
(National Salvation Party)
Anavatan Partisi
(Motherland Party)
Milliyetyi Demokrasi Partisi
(Nationalist Democracy Party)
Hiirriyet Partisi
(Freedom Party)
Dogru Yol Partisi
(True Path Party)
Sosyal Demokrat Halkgi Parti
(Social Democratic Populist Party)
Demokratik Sol Parti
(Democratic Left Party)
Refah Partisi
(Welfare Party)
Halkin Demokrasi Partisi (People's
Democratic Party)
Fazilet Partisi (Virtue Party)
Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi
(Justice and Development Party)
Affiliation
Right
Connections
CMP & KP
Years active
1957-1969
Center-right
1961-1980 (banned)
Center-left,
secularist
Right
1923-1980 (banned);
1992-present
CKMP
1969-1980 (banned)
Center-right
CHP dissidents
1967-1971
Center-right
GP
Center-right
CHP dissidents
1946-1960 (banned)
RightIslamist
Center-right
MNP founder
post-ban
1972-1980 (banned)
Center-right
Center-left
Outgoing
military regime
DP dissidents
Center-right
AP members
Center-left
merger of HaP
& SODEP
1985-1995
(merged with CHP)
1985-
MSP
1983-1998 (banned)
Alleged links
to the PKK
RP
1997-2003 (banned)
FP
2001-
1983-
Center-left
RightIslamist
Kurdish
RightIslamist
RightIslamist
1983-1985
(merged with ANAP)
1955-1958
(merged with CHP)
1983-
1998-2001 (banned)
These 18 parties can be collapsed into a smaller group based on their connection to
earlier parties. Figure 5-2 provides an overview of the succession of parties since the 1961
elections. Each row corresponds to a unique party or related parties: for example, CHP, a relic of
the single party system that dominated Turkish politics until 1961, kept its name until the 1980
103
coup (after it was denied entry into the 1983 election), and then renamed itself "SHP", used that
name for the 1987 and 1991 elections, and then returned to its original name in time for the 1995
elections.
Figure 5-2: Evolution of Turkish Parties
1960 Coup
'61
'65
CKMP
1971 Coup
'69
AP
GP
'73
MHP
1980 Coup
'77
'83
'91
'95
'99
'02
MHP
'07
DYP
CGP
DP
CHP
HP
MNP
'87
MHP
MSP
ANAP & MDP ('83 only)
SHP
CHP
DSP
RP
FP
HADEP
AKP
DEHAP
Political parties are prohibited from organizing based on religion, and this law has been
enforced multiple times by the Constitutional Court. The Constitutional Court banned the
Welfare Party in 1998, and the Virtue Party in 2001 because they were deemed pro-Islamic and
were violating the principle of secularism (they were also gaining significant political strength
among the Turkish electorate) (Esmer and Sayari 2002). Yet regardless of the secular nature of
the state and its laws, there is still a disagreement about whether Islam should play a role in
government.
This question has gained momentum, especially after the electoral success of the Justice
and Development Party (AKP). AKP, the current ruling party, in fact, has roots in the now
banned Welfare Party, and while it is seen as pro-Western, there are questions as to its true
agenda. The political battle over the role of religion in Turkey has transcended the
secular/Islamist divide and has treaded with the Kurdish question in recent years.
104
Table 5-3 provides an overview of the electoral system evolution in Turkey since its
adoption of democratically elected government. The military coups refocused the political
system several times, through suspension of elections, broad political party bans, and rewriting
the Constitution. Until the 1960 coup, Turkey used a majority-rule electoral system. In 1961,
however, the military rewrote the Constitution and adopted a proportional representation system
without a national threshold. This system remained in place until 1980, despite another military
coup in 1971. In 1980, the military again suspended elections, banned all existing political
parties (and their members), and rewrote the constitution. They also altered the electoral system
to include a 10% national threshold. The size of the parliament varied greatly between 1946 and
2007, from a low of 400 in 1983 to a high in 1957 of 610. The right-most column displays the
seat share for the largest parties in the Grand National Assembly. After the PR system was
introduced, Turkey went from a 2 party system to a multi party system. Following the 1980
military coup, there were still several parties who took part in elections, but the number of parties
actually winning seats decreased.
105
Table 5-3: Evolution of the Turkish Electoral System
Year
1946
1950
1954
1957
Electoral Law
Plurality system
Plurality system
Plurality system
Plurality system
Size
465
539
541
610
1960
1961
1965
1969
Seat Share
DP 13%, CHP 85%
DP 87%, CHP 13%
DP 93%, CHP 6%
DP 60%, CHP 29%
Military Coup
DP banned
PR
PR
PR
450
450
450
1971
CHP 38%, AP 35%, YTP 14%, CKMP 12%
AP 53%, CHP 29%, MP 7%, YTP 4%, TIP 3%, CKMP 2%
AP 57%, CHP 32%, GP 3%, MP 2%, YTP 1%
1973
1977
1980
PR
PR
450
450
Military Coup
MNP banned
CHP 41%, AP 33%, MSP 11%, DP 10%, MHP 3%
CHP 47%, AP 42%, MSP 5%, MHP 4%
Military Coup
All parties banned
1983
1987
PR with 10% threshold
PR with 10% threshold,
district threshold
PR with 10% threshold
PR with 10% threshold
399
450
ANAP 53%, HP 29%, MDP 18%
ANAP 65%, SHP 22%, DYP 13%
450
550
DYP 40%, ANAP 25%, SHP 20%, RP 18% DSP 2%
RP 29%, ANAP 24%, DYP 25%, DSP 14%, CHP 9%
1991
1995
1997
1998
1999
PM asked to resign by military, accepted
RP banned
PR with 10% threshold
550
PR with 10% threshold
550
PR with 10% threshold
550
2001
2002
FP banned
2003
2007
DSP 25%, MHP 23%, FP 20%, ANAP 16%, DYP 16%
AKP 66%, CHP 32%
HADEP banned
2008
AKP 62%, CHP 20%, MHP 13%
AKPfined by ConstitutionalCourt
Islamist parties:an uphill battle
Due to the strict rules governing political party formation in Turkey, religious or ethnicbased parties are prohibited from participating in politics. There have been, however, several
conservative Islam-oriented parties participating in Turkey's elections. The largest of these
parties all competed consecutively beginning in 1973, when the MSP was formed. The founder
of MSP (and almost all subsequent Islamist parties), Necmettin Erbakan is a mainstay of the
Islamist political movement in Turkey. All of the Islamist parties are linked to the MSP, and each
party formed from the remnants of its banned predecessor. The MSP formed in 1972, after its
106
predecessor, the MNP was banned in the military coup, and participated in elections leading up
to the 1980 military coup. As all parties were banned in the aftermath, and the 1983 elections
were regulated by the military, the leadership of the MSP did not form another party until after
the 1983 election, when Erbakan formed the Refah Partisi (Welfare Party, or RP). The RP was
quite successful during the 1990s, bringing Erbakan to the post of Prime Minister in 1996.
Erbakan's policies of improving Turkey's relations with its Arab neighbors and opposing
Zionism caused frustration among the military establishment. The military issued public
warnings to Erbakan during his tenure as PM, until in 1997 the military forced him to step down.
Instead of the position being filled by the FP's coalition member, the DYP, however, the
President (an opponent of both the FP and DYP) instead assigned to the CHP the position of
Prime Minister.
The Constitutional Court banned the RP shortly after this "postmodern coup," along with
Erbakan, from politics. Erbakan then formed the Fazilet Partisi (FP), which participated in the
1999 elections only to be banned in 2001. Following this Court ban, Erbakan's followers created
the Saadet Partisi (SP), while other former FP members broke off to form the Adalet ve
Kalkinma Partisi (AKP), led by Tayyip Erdogan. It was this AKP that won a majority of the
seats in the Grand National Assembly in both the 2002 and 2007 elections.
Table 5-4 displays the vote share and seat share for the Islamist parties. Before the 1990s
these parties did not receive significant support at the polls, but beginning with the 1991 election,
the RP, FP and AKP increased both their vote share and seat share each election, despite their
allegedly anti-nationalist agenda.
107
Table 5-4: Islamist Performance, 1973-2007
Year
1973
1977
1987
1991
1995
1999
2002
2007
Party
MSP
MSP
RP
RP
RP
FP
AKP
AKP
Vote Share
11.8%
8.6%
7.2%
16.9%
21.4%
15.4%
34.4%
46.6%
Seat Share
10.7%
5.3%
0.0%
13.8%
28.7%
20.2%
56.2%
62.0%
This chapter has discussed the impact of conservative, Islamist political parties on
Turkey's electoral system. Islamist parties have competed in elections since the early 1970s, with
little success until the 1990s. The initial evidence suggests that the regime (this includes
members of the military, the Constitutional Court or centrist political opponents) feels threatened
by the entrance of conservative, religious politics into national political debate. Turkey has a
long history of a proactive military regime, ready (and willing) to dissolve the parliament,
suspend elections, or alter the structure of political debate. Scholars cite the presence of a high
election threshold as a difficult barrier for parties to overcome, but the effect of this threshold on
representation has yet to be measured. In Chapter 6 I examine the impact of this mechanism on
the transformation of votes into seats in Turkey.
108
Chapter 6
Universal Control in Turkey: The Election Threshold
In Chapter 5, I provided an overview of the political history of Turkey.
Turkey has been plagued by military coups, the most significant of which resulted in a brand
new constitution and a reformed electoral system. While Turkey's elections have been widely
considered "free and fair" for all those parties and individuals who have been able to participate
them, there are still indications that the system might not be as open as it seems. The
Constitutional Court's bans on specific political parties, the 10% national threshold, questionable
policies regarding ethnicity and religion in public life- all of these features of the regime's
policies point towards mechanisms for control inherent in Turkey's regime. Do the empirical
data available on Turkey's elections support this hypothesis? More specifically, what has been
the effect of the 1980 military coup reforms on political party performance in Turkey?
While some of the mechanisms for control in Turkey's case (specifically, the
Constitutional Court's and the military's ability to ban parties during a party's involvement with
the government and military coups) are easy to identify by performing a case study, others are
less obvious. National election thresholds are a feature of many PR systems (Germany and
Poland both have 5%national thresholds and Israel's national threshold is 2%), but none is as
high as Turkey's. There is no standardized way to determine the effective national threshold of a
PR system, except when the district magnitude (DM) is the same in all districts (Taagepera
2002). This is not the case for Turkey. What is the effect of the 10% national threshold on
representation in the Turkish parliament especially in the cases of the Islamist political parties
that have recently won pluralities in the parliament?
109
To examine this, I collected the parliamentary election results for all of Turkey's
parliamentary elections since 1960. Overall, there were 12 elections that spanned one significant
electoral reform: a PR system without a national threshold through the 1977 election, and
beginning in 1983 a PR system with a 10% national threshold and stricter rules regarding the
formation of new parties.
Arguably the most important characteristic of an party system is the number of parties
that end up participating in the government. G. Bingham Powell's (2000) study of elections in
twenty democracies examines the normative claim that democracies are governments in which
the people participate in policy making by voting for their representatives. Powell uses the
effective number of parties calculation created by Laakso and Taagepera (1979) to measure the
number of competing parties in an electoral system. He finds the effective number of parties in
majoritarian systems tends to be close to 2 (consistent with Duverger's Law), while consensual
systems tend to have a larger effective number of parties (Duverger 1972, Powell 2000).
Majoritarian systems are most likely two-party systems, while consensual democracies
tend to have multiparty systems. Because parties do not all attract the same proportion of voters,
it's necessary to take into consideration the size of a party's followers when calculating the
number of parties in an electoral system. Laakso and Taagepera (1979) developed the effective
number of parties calculation to count how many parties are active in the system. While Laakso
and Taagepera use the seat share of each party in the calculation, it is also possible to substitute
that for vote share (especially in the case of proportional representation systems, which might not
always translate votes into seats in a 1:1 ratio).
110
N-
1
Effective Number of Parties
p,= fractional share of votes or seats of the i-th party
Taagepera and Shugart (1989) complete an in-depth study of electoral systems to explain
how different rules relate to political systems. Their goal was to generalize the relationship between
representation and votes. They focus a large portion of their study on empirical analysis, examining
the effective number of parties, district magnitude (DM), and Duverger's Law. Using the effective
number of parties (N) Taagepera and Shugart find that in almost all actual election results, N is
within +/-1 of the number of parties that receive more than 10% of the votes.
The data are summarized in Table 6-1. I have included the number of seats available,
which varies from 450 to 550. From 1961 through 1977, there were 450 seats in the parliament;
in 1983 the size of parliament was lowered to 400, but was returned to 450 through the 1991
elections. From 1995 on, the parliament has had 550 seats available. The number of electoral
districts has increased over time, from 67 through the 1987 elections, to 74 in 1991; redistricting
in 1995 increased the number of districts to 79, then 80 in 1999; in 2002, the number of districts
was increased again to create 85 electoral districts (mostly by dividing large urban areas like
Izmir and Istanbul into multiple districts). I calculated the mean DM for each election year, as
well as the median DM (which has remained constant at 6 since 1961), and the standard
deviation for the DM; the standard deviation has fluctuated over time, but has been at least 4.5
and has been as large as 8.5. The standard deviation indicates that while the mean DM has not
changed greatly over time, the DM of any district can vary greatly. The smallest DM is 1 in
Hakkari from 1961-1977 and Tunceli in 1999 and the largest is in 1999 in Istanbul with 71 seats
111
(after the 1999 elections Istanbul was divided into 3 districts). The level of party success is also
listed, which I have defined as the number of parties who won seats over the number of parties
who participated in the election; I have excluded the independent candidates from this
calculation.
While from 1961 to 1983 almost every party that competed in each election won seats,
this trend changes dramatically beginning in 1987. The elections in the 1990s and 2000s were
especially difficult for parties, with 2 out 18 competing parties winning seats in 2002 and 3 of 13
parties in 2007. Calculating the effective number of parties provides indications of the number
of parties that win enough seats or votes to be considered significant players in the system. By
summing the square of the vote or seat share for all of the parties in an election and then finding
the inverse of that sum, this process will determine the number of parties that actually hold
significant power.
For example, in 1977 there were eight parties that competed in the elections for seats (the
AP won 37% of the vote, the CHP won 41% of the vote, the MHP won 6.4%, the MSP won
8.6%, the CGP won 1.87%, the DP won 1.85%, the TBP 0.39%, and TIP 0.14%). Of these
parties, only six were assigned seats. Since the AP, CHP, and MSP won a larger proportion of
the votes relative to the other five, their strength is much greater. By calculating this relative
strength using the effective number of parties, we can assign a numerical quantity to this result:
3.129. When using the proportion of seats as the variable, however, N changes significantly: it
decreases to 2.472 (the proportion of seats assigned to each of the six parties is as follows: CHP
47%, AP 42%, MSP 5.3%, MHP 3.6%, CGP 0.67%, DP 0.22%).
I calculated the effective number of parties in two ways: using the seat share won by each
party and using the vote share won by each party. Through 1983 the difference between these
112
two calculations is not great, but just as the party success rate varies, it too changes significantly
in 1987. The greatest disparity between these two calculations occurs in 1999 and 2002.
Table 6-1: The Turkish Electoral System since 1961: Institutionalized Repression
Year
Total
1961
1965
1969
1973
1977
1983
1987
1991
1995
1999
2002
2007
450
450
450
450
450
400
450
450
550
550
550
550
Mean
Standard
1
Deviation
DM
--6.716
4.680
6.716
4.687
6.716
5.016
6.716
5.507
6.716
6.270
5.970
4.922
6.716
6.093
6.081
6.313
6.962
7.639
6.875
8.570
6.471
4.816
6.471
4.838
Party
Success Rate
4/4
6/6
8/8
7/8
6/8
3/3
3/7
5/6
5/12
5/20
2/18
3/13
Effective Number
of Parties (S)
3.264
2.623
2.345
3.323
2.472
2.530
2.055
3.581
4.397
4.873
2.568
2.260
Effective Number
of Parties (V)
3.396
2.711
3.335
4.313
3.129
2.852
4.115
4.676
6.154
10.185
15.023
3.504
The data in Table 6-1 show several characteristics of the Turkish electoral system: there
is great deal of variation in DM, parties since 1987 have been much less successful in winning
representation in the parliament, and there is great disparity between the proportion of votes won
and seats received by parties at the national level. Are these trends maintained when analysis is
performed at the party level?
For all electoral systems, there is the question of how votes are translated into seats, and
whether or not the transformation proportionally distributes the votes to the parties or candidates
well. The Gallagher Index, developed in 1991, measures the total level of proportionality
between votes and seats in an election. Gallagher (1991) compares several methods of
1The median DM is 6 for all years
113
computing disproportionality in PR systems, and demonstrates how the most common methods
perform (among them the highest averages method, ratio of votes to seats). He settles on the
method of least squares as the most descriptive, and finds that it is superior to other methods
because it takes into account the level of disproportionality at the party level, rather than simply
the system-wide disproportionality (Gallagher 1991). The Gallagher Index is measured on a
scale of 0 to 100, with 0 being a perfect translation of votes into seats (e.g. 1% of the vote is
awarded 1% of the seats exactly), while a score of 100 is assigned to the most disproportional
system. Vi is the proportion of vote share a party wins, while Si is the proportion of seat share a
party is assigned (in percentages, not fractions).
LSq =
(V i - Si) 2
(1/2)
i= I
The Gallagher Index
I used the nationwide results, by party, to calculate the degree of disproportionality in
each election. I calculated the Gallagher Index to measure the level of disproportionality for the
entire result, and then calculated the difference between seat share and vote share for each of the
major parties. Table 6-2 describes these results, using the parties outlined previously.
The Gallagher Index for Turkey's Grand National Assembly becomes significantly
higher after the 1983 reforms. Party-level disproportionality also is illustrative of the effect of the
threshold on representation. It is only after the 1983 election (in which the regime restricted the
parties that were permitted to participate) that parties are unsuccessful at winning seats in the
parliament. In addition, after the 1980 reforms the magnitude of disproportionality at the party
level is much larger than in the pre-1980 elections. This disproportionality is large for both
parties that are overrepresented and those that are either underrepresented or not represented at
114
all. For many of these years, those parties not winning any seats have significant success
(oftentimes more than 5% of the nationwide votes) in the election, but due to the 10%
requirement, they receive no seats.
Table 6-2: Nationwide Disproportionality in Turkey's Elections
(S-V)
AP/
DYP
0.31
0.46
10.34
3.29
5.11
GP/
CGP
Year
Lsq
1961
1.92
1965
1.00
1969
8.81
-3.25
1973
6.73
-2.37
1977
6.50
-1.20
1983
6.70
1987 22.29
-6.03
1991
11.29
12.53
1995
9.76
5.37
1999
9.46
3.44
2002 20.27
-9.54
2007 11.93
The Gallagher Index formula is
CHP/
HP
/SHP
1.70
1.03
4.41
7.82
5.94
-1.21
-2.74
-1.19
-1.80
-8.71
7.82
-0.52
Independent candidates were not included in
the calculation of the Gallagher Index.
(S-V) was calculated by subtracting the
proportion of votes received by each party at
the national level from the proportion of
seats awarded to that party at the national
level.
CKMP/
MHP
-1.96
0.20
-2.81
-2.71
-2.86
DP
MSP/
RP/FP/
AKP
-1.89
-1.63
-1.13
-3.24
ANAP/
MDP
DSP
HADEP
7.61, -5.52
-7.16
28.58 -8.53
-3.10
1.55 -9.19
-8.18
7.35
4.35 -0.82
-4.17
5.47
4.77
2.42
2.54
-4.75
-8.35
21.72
-5.11 -1.22
-6.14
-1.36
15.42
Bold indicates that the party did not win seats in that
election
Italics indicates that the party won > 40% of the votes
Underline indicates that the party controlled the
largest proportion of seats (not necessarily the
majority)
For seat share and vote share for each party, see
Appendix B-1, B-2.
-2.93
Even when examining nationwide election results at the party-level, the seat-vote
disparity uncovered in the nationwide results remains. The disproportionality of the electoral
system as a whole increases significantly after 1983, and for the first time parties are unable to
win seats in the parliament, despite their success at the polls (even parties that won 7-9% of the
nation-wide votes did not win any seats as a result of the 10% threshold). Barriers to party
115
participation despite electoral success and nationwide disproportionality increase since the 1983
elections- nationwide and party-level analysis suggests that electoral mechanisms create
misrepresentation at the national level in Turkey's elections. How has this mechanism affected a
single party over time, and where is the mechanism felt strongest?
District-level Misrepresentation
Analysis of Turkey's parliamentary elections has highlighted nationwide vote-seat
disproportionality and low party success rate. Does this misrepresentation carry over to districtlevel party-level results? By focusing on a single party (or at least, parties that trace themselves
back to a single party), we can assess the impact of Turkey's mechanisms (mainly, the national
threshold) on it. How does one party perform in Turkey's elections? And more specifically,
how does the 10% national threshold influence party success at the national level and variation in
DM affect district-level results?
The group of parties I analyze is all the parties that are traced to the MSP. There was one
main Islamist group taking part in elections in 1973, 1977, and from 1987 to 2007. The MSP
participated in 1973 and 1977; the RP was active from 1987-1995; the FP in 1999; and the AKP
from 2002 to the present. Both the RP and the FP were banned because of their religious
orientation, while the MSP was banned during the 1980 military coup. The AKP, meanwhile, is
currently the majority government and in 2008 narrowly avoided being banned by the
Constitutional Court as well. All of these parties are directly linked to the MSP.
Figure 6-1 illustrates the disproportionality at the province level for the Islamist parties
since 1973. Over time, the Islamist parties have become more successful at winning seats
overall, but these results indicate that they have also been becoming overrepresented. 2002 is the
116
year in which the AKP achieved its highest level of overrepresentation throughout the system.
Each histogram displays the difference between seat share and vote share for the Islamic party on
the horizontal axis and the number of districts in which that disproportionality was present in one
election. For all bars to the left of zero, the party received a smaller share of the seats than the
votes it received in that district. For bars to the right of zero, the party received more seats than
the votes it won in the district.
Figure 6-1: Islamist Parties' Province-level Results
Before the 1980 coup, the seat-vote difference for the MSP was evenly spread out among
over and underrepresented districts, which corresponds to the nationwide results discussed
117
earlier. In 1987, the RP did not win any seats and therefore its results are all on the negative side
of the horizontal axis. In 1991 and 1995, however, the RP was successful in winning seats; in
1991, the RP still was underrepresented in most districts, while in 1995 the RP actually was
overrepresented overall (it was banned in advance of the 1999 elections). The FP was also able
to win more seats than votes in the 1999 elections (and it was also banned before the 2002
elections). In 2002, the AKP proved to be extremely successful at the polls, winning more seats
than votes in almost all of the districts. The 2007 elections were also successful for the AKP, but
it did not get as large of a seat bonus as in 2002.
What is the distribution of province-level seat-vote differences? Is there a noticeable
trend in specific districts? Because of the large number of administrative divisions in Turkey, I
selected four districts from among Turkey's 85, choosing ones that varied in location,
population, and DM. Table 6-3 displays the distribution of seat-vote differences in those districts
each year. Adyamin is in the southeast of the country, Bingol in the east, Kayseri in the center,
and Konya in the southwest. In Bingol, the DM was two through 1977, and then from 1987 on
was a DM of three. With such a small DM, the conversion of vote share to seat share generated
large seat bonuses in terms of seat proportion. With such few seats in play, however, the
absolute number of seats awarded to the party did not increase significantly, especially since
there were between 400 and 550 seats in the entire Parliament. Adiyamin had a DM that varied
between 4 and 6. The votes-to-seats transformation also resulted in increasingly generous
bonuses through 2002. Again, with such few seats to divide among several parties, the seat
distribution did not contribute greatly to the party's seat share. Kayseri's DM was between 7 and
9, with the majority of years staying at 8. With the exception of 1991 and 2002, the votes-toseats transformation did not result in as great seat bonuses proportionally. Konya had the largest
118
DM of the four districts I chose: proportionally, the difference between vote share and seat share
was on a similar scale as Kayseri's. However, when DM is taken into consideration, the seat
bonuses (in terms of absolute number of seats) for a district as large as Konya are significantly
greater than in a district half its size.
Table 6-3: Islamist party election results in select provinces
Bingol
Vote
1973
1977
1987
1991
1995
1999
2002
2007
Seat
Share Share
25.5
50.0
25.4
0.0
22.2
0.0
35.0
66.7
51.6 100.0
24.4
66.7
31.6 100.0
71.5 100.0
Seats -
District
Vote
Votes
24.5
-25.4
-22.2
31.7
48.4
42.3
68.4
28.5
Magnitude
2
2
3
3
3
3
3
3
Share
22.1
19.2
11.4
24.9
32.6
27.5
41.5
65.1
Adiyamin
Seat
Seats Share Votes
25.0
2.9
25.0
5.8
0.0
0.0
40.0
50.0
80.0
80.0
Kayseri
1973
1977
1987
1991
1995
1999
2002
2007
Vote
Seat
Share
16.5
9.0
9.3
31.6
33.1
23.2
54.1
65.6
Share
12.5
0.0
0.0
100.0
44.4
25.0
87.5
75.0
Seats -
-11.4
-24.9
7.4
22.5
38.5
14.9
District
Magnitude
4
4
4
4
5
6
5
5
Konya
District
Vote
Votes Magnitude Share
-4.0
8
16.5
-9.0
8
19.7
-9.3
8
15.0
68.4
7
33.0
11.3
9
41.7
1.8
8
30.2
33.4
8
54.9
9.4
8
64.8
Seat
Share
Seats Votes
18.8
18.8
0.0
2.3
-0.9
-15.0
46.2
13.2
56.3
14.6
37.5
87.5
7.3
32.6
81.3
16.5
District
MaIagnitude
16
16
14
13
16
16
16
16
Another illustration of disproportionality is Figure 6-2. The horizontal axis is the election
year, and the vertical axis represents the difference between seat share and vote share awarded to
the Islamist parties. The 4 districts I discussed are labeled on this plot. Since 1987, Islamist
parties have become more competitive in the electoral system in Turkey. It is important to note
that the MSP participated in the 1973 and 1977 elections, the RP in 1987, 1991, and 1995, the FP
is the party that competed in the 1999 elections and the AKP participated from the 2002 elections
119
to 2007. In 1987, the RP did not surpass the 10% threshold and so was not awarded any seats
coup, the difference
(which is why all of the points are below the S-V=O line). Before the 1980
After the
between votes and seats at the district level was relatively small, never exceeding 0.2.
much greater districtcoup, however, the elections in which the Islamist party participated show
level seat-vote disproportionality, reaching -+0.70 in 1991 and 2002. The number of districts
until in 2002
being underrepresented (that is, below the S-V=O line) drops gradually over time;
and 2007 there are only 2 districts and 1 district, respectively, which received fewer seats than
votes.
Figure 6-2: District-level seat-vote disproportionality for the Islamist party
Note: I jittered the resulting scatter plots to show the concentrations of disproportionality each year.
120
Notice that Bingol and Adiyamin, the smallest districts, are generally on the extremes of
the vertical axis after the 1980 coup: in 1987 Bingol has one of the lowest vote-seat
disproportionality scores, while in 1991 Adiyamin is in this same spot. In 1995, 1999, and 2002
Bingol was among the districts with the largest seat bonuses. Beginning in 1995, these four
districts are always on the positive side of the votes-to-seats transformation; in each of them, the
Islamist party always received seat bonuses. From 1995 to 2002, the Islamist party received seat
bonuses in all four labeled districts, which indicates a more general trend that the Islamist party
improved its performance across all districts. In 2007, the magnitude of seat bonuses overall
decreases, but the AKP maintained its general positive seat-vote disproportionality.
Does the district magnitude influence the level of disproportionality in a district? Despite
Esmer and Sayari's (2002) examination of the evolution of parties, the determinants of voting,
and election results at the national level in Turkey, their study also does not probe the effects of
the election threshold on the translation of vote share to seat share.
Carey and Hix (2009) examine the effect of DM on proportionality, and find that lowmagnitude districts are the highest achievers on a combined scale of proportionality, party
system fragmentation, coalition-building, and government performance. They use the median
DM of a system to reach this conclusion. This choice causes problems in countries with a large
variation on DM, as it does not account for how seats are distributed at the district level. For
example, in Turkey the median DM is 6 (placing it in Carey and Hix "small DM systems"), but
the variation on the mean actually varies quite a bit (depending on the year, the standard
121
deviation is between 4.6 and 8.6). Because of this large variation, is it accurate to consider
Turkey a true "small DM system"?
Does varying the DM in Turkey's electoral districts affect proportionality? Table 6-4
provides an overview of the Islamist parties' performance among all districts, broken down by
district size. I defined districts with a DM between 1 and 4 as "small," 5-8 as "medium" and 9 or
greater as "large." This figure provides the number of districts in a given year that fall under that
categorization, the mean magnitude of these districts, the percentage of votes Islamist parties
received (in all those size districts), and the percentage of total seats received. For example, in
1995 there were 28 "medium" districts, with a mean magnitude of 6.29 seats. The RP received
22.95% of the total votes in these districts, and was awarded 32.95% of the total seats available.
Table 6-4: Islamist Party Results Based on District Size
Small (1-4)
Medium (5-8)
Mean
Year
1973
1977
1987
1991
1995
1999
2002
2007
Mean
DM
V
3.2
3.2
3.3
3.0
3.1
3.0
3.0
3.0
12.1
9.5
6.5
16.8
20.8
12.9
30.5
45.2
S
S-V
10.1 -2.0
5.9 -3.6
0.0 -6.5
33.3 16.5
28.6 7.8
18.6 5.7
70.1 39.6
65.2 20.0
I
DM
25
27
25
36
34
39
39
39
6.4
6.5
6.3
6.1
6.3
6.2
6.3
6.3
V
12.8
12.7
8.8
19.1
23.0
16.0
37.8
51.2
S
S-V
10.4 -2.5
5.7 -7.1
0.0 -8.8
23.0
3.9
33.0 10.0
21.5
5.4
74.1 36.3
69.6 18.4
Z
30
30
31
27
28
24
27
27
Large (9+)
Mean
Year
DM
V
S
S-V
X
1973
1977
1987
1991
1995
1999
2002
14.8
17.1
15.8
16.0
15.9
16.6
13.8
10.7
6.7
6.0
15.1
20.7
15.8
33.5
11.2
4.7
0.0
6.8
25.9
19.1
60.1
0.5
-2.0
-6.0
-8.3
5.2
3.3
26.6
12
10
11
11
17
17
19
2007
13.9
44.7
55.7
11.0
19
122
The number of districts in the small and large categories increased significantly from
1973-2007. In addition, the mean DM of small districts decreased slightly, while the mean DM
increased and then decreased after 1999 in large districts. The number and mean DM of medium
districts remained relatively constant throughout this time period. The largest disproportionality
occurred in the small and medium-sized districts- since these districts have few seats to divide up
among the competing parties, it follows that these districts would be particularly disproportional.
For a visual representation of this disproportionality, the following figure provides the
vote and seat returns, by DM, for Islamist parties from 1973-2007. I have graphed the small,
medium, and large DM districts separately, to relate the relationships from Table 6-4 to seat-vote
proportionality (for reference, DM<5 circles, DM>4 &<9 triangles, DM>8 squares). The x-axis
represents the vote share received by the Islamist party, while the y-axis represents the seat share
awarded to the same party. I also included the line V=S (shown as a diagonal line) in the graphs
to represent perfect proportionality. In the 1970s, the MSP was underrepresented in the small
districts (circles), as many of the districts in which they won a significant amount of votes were
not awarded to the MSP. Before the 1980 coup, Islamist parties received more seats than votes
in the small DM districts, and fewer seats than votes in the large DM districts. In 1973, the MSP
was slightly underrepresented in the medium districts (triangles), but the graph indicates that the
districts in which the MSP was awarded seats were overrepresented.
123
Figure 6-3: From Votes to Seats: 1973-2007
Note: DM<5 circles, DM>4 &<9 triangles, DM>8 squares, and the line in each graph is the V=S line or
perfect proportionality line, not a regression line; the dashed line is the fitted line to the data
The overall underrepresentation in 1973 is due to the MSP not being awarded seats in
several districts in which they won many votes. Overall, the MSP was represented roughly
proportional to its vote share in large districts (squares), but the graph indicates that in the
districts in which the MSP was awarded seats, they won slightly more seats than votes. The
MSP was underrepresented across all DM sizes in 1977, which the graph shows is a result of the
MSP not receiving any seats in many districts, despite solid performances at the polls in those
districts. Again, in the districts in which the MSP was successful at winning seats, their seat
share is greater than their vote share.
124
In the 1990s, the RP and the FP were the Islamist parties competing for representation in
the parliament. The graphs for these elections indicate that there were many districts in which
the party failed to gain representation, and in 1991 the RP was refused seats in districts of all
sizes. When the RP was successful, however, it gained slightly more seats than votes overall, but
was awarded significant seat bonuses in the small (circles) and medium (triangles) districts,
while receiving only small bonuses in the few large districts it won seats. In 1995, the RP was
much more successful at the elections overall. It only failed to win seats in small and medium
districts, but in fewer districts overall. The RP received greater seat shares than vote shares in
virtually all districts, but the DM affected the size of the seat bonus. In 1991, the RP received
the largest seat bonuses in medium districts (squares), and in 1995 and 1999 the RP received the
greatest seat bonuses in small districts (circles); this can be explained by the simple fact that
there are fewer seats to divide among the successful parties, and so the most successful parties
(even if they win 30-50% of the district vote) can win the majority of the seats. The RP received
the smallest seat bonuses in large districts (squares): as DM goes up, there are more seats to be
divided among the competing parties, and so the seat bonuses are not as generous.
After referring back to Table 6-2 a clearer pictures forms. In the 1973 and 1977
elections, the MSP gained representation in many districts, and its nationwide V-S scores for
these elections was -1.13 and -3.24, respectively (indicating that they were awarded 1.13 and
3.24% fewer seats than they won in votes). The RP failed to exceed the threshold in 1987, and so
it was not seated in the Grand National Assembly (it won 7.16% of the nationwide votes). In
1991, the RP succeeded in exceeding the 10% threshold, but were awarded a smaller seat share
than vote share. In 1995, the RP exceeds V=S line in more districts, resulting in a greater seat
share than vote share (generating V-S=+7.35). In 1999, S-V is still positive, but slightly smaller
125
(+4.77), indicating that the disproportionality, at least with regards to the FP, was smaller. In
2002 all but one district, the AKP held a significantly greater seat share than vote share, which
explains why all but one districts is placed far above the V=S line. The AKP's S- V is +21.72,
meaning that it received 22% more seats in the Grand National Assembly than its vote share
would have indicated. In 2007, the AKP still captures a larger seat share than vote share, but the
difference between these two (S-V) is not as large (+15.42). Note these V-S calculations are
done from the nation-wide seat share and vote share, not on an individual district basis. I also
note that this disproportionality is not unique to the Islamist parties; all parties since 1983 have
experienced greater seat-vote disparities than in elections prior.
The AKP has been by far the most successful Islamist political party in Turkish politics.
In 2007 and 2007 the AKP won seats in all but one district. As a result, the AKP was
overrepresented in all district magnitude levels, but the size of the DM does influence the seat
bonuses regardless. The largest seat bonuses were in the smallest (circles) districts, followed by
the medium (circles) districts, and then the large districts (squares). In the 2002 elections, the
AKP also increased its seat bonus as its district-level success grew in the small and medium
districts in relation to the large districts. The regression lines in the 2002 elections indicate that,
in the small and large districts, as the AKP's success grew, it received greater seat shares. If the
regression lines were parallel, the seat:vote ratio (the slope of the line) would be the same across
all DMs; this is not the case in 2002.
Winner Take More?
After examining the results for Islamist parties in Turkey's Grand National Assembly
Elections, especially the 2002 and 2007 district-level vote-seat disproportionality, another
126
possibility arises: the party that is the most successful that receives the most generous seat
bonuses? Figure 6-4 displays the vote-seat scatter plots for the top vote getting party in each of
Turkey's elections since 1961. Before the 1980 military coup, the top vote getter did not stray
far from district-level proportional vote share-seat share- the few instances of districts far from
the V=S line have the smallest DM, and thus the fewest seats to give out. As a result, the V-S for
that district may be large and positive or small and negative, but in reality there were 4 or fewer
seats to be awarded (parties received a significant seat proportion bonus, but this bonus did not
result in a great deal more seats in total). The results after 1983 are much less proportional.
ANAP's win in 1987 translated into a seat bonus in almost every district (just like the AKP in
2002 and 2007).
Note: DM<5 circles, DM>4 &<9 triangles, DM>8 squares, and the line in each graph is the V=S line or
perfect proportionality line, not a regression line; the dashed line is the fitted line to the data
127
The analyses of Turkey's elections indicate that there is a great deal of disproportionality
on a national as well as province level. By focusing on the Islamist parties' performance since
1973, it is clear that the system put into place after the 1980 coup is sacrificing representation.
While the regime may have installed this system to prevent opposition parties from gaining
power, it is clear that the Islamist parties have overcome the obstacles put in place to gain power.
Since 1983, parties have become less successful at gaining seats in the national
legislature. In addition, the effective number of parties' calculations using vote share and seat
share indicates a great deal of disproportionality at the national level since 1983. Indeed, 18
parties competed in the 2002 election, with two winning seats. Using vote share with the
effective number of parties calculation, there were 15 parties; with seat share this calculation was
2.6 parties. The 10% threshold is clearly at work in this example: seven of the 18 parties won
more than 5% of the national vote, which would have awarded them each approximately 27 seats
if there was no minimum vote share requirement. The Gallagher Index of proportionality
analysis indicates that disproportionality increased significantly after the 1983 elections.
Combining this result with the party success rate and effective number of parties analysis
provides further evidence that the 10% national threshold is contributing greatly to
misrepresentation in the Turkish parliament. The difference between seat share and vote share
for parties at the national level also increased significantly after the 1983 elections, providing
party-level evidence for the effect of the threshold on the transformation of votes into seats. By
focusing analysis on a single party throughout this time period, I uncovered district-level effects
of the threshold and DM variation on the conversion of votes into seats. The results for the
Islamist party over time, with a special focus on elections after the 1980 military coup, indicates
that these barriers to representation have recently been overcome. Once it met the 10% threshold
128
in the 1991 elections, the Islamist party gradually improved upon its success to culminate in the
2002 and 2007 elections in which they gained large majorities at both the national level and at
the district level. In examining the effect of DM on party success, it has become ever more clear
that when a party can reach the 10% threshold nationally, its success at the polls will generate
significant seat bonuses, with the largest effect on small and medium-sized (less than 9 seats)
districts. In the next section, I provide a counterfactual analysis: with a 5% national threshold,
instead of the 10% threshold, what would Turkey's parliament have looked like since 1983
(assuming the same vote shares for the parties).
Election Thresholds and Representation
To reallocate seats under a new election threshold poses several challenges: the D'Hondt
method requires focusing on a single district at a time, which in Turkey's case means a total of
85 seat allocations, in districts with as many as 25 seats (in a few cases even 60). Instead of
reallocating all 550 seats, I have focused on the 4 districts I discussed in detail in Chapter 6. I
reallocated all of the seats in these districts using a 5% national election threshold, assuming the
vote shares for the parties is unchanged.
The D'Hondt method of seat allocation is used in many countries with PR electoral
systems. After the votes are counted in each district, the parties (if it is a closed list) or
candidates (if it is an open list system) are arranged in descending order. For each district, a
separate calculation must be taken. Successive quotients are taken using the total number of
votes for each party. The formula for the D'Hondt method is
V
s+1
129
Where V represents the total number of votes received by the party or candidate, and s is
the total number of seats allocated already. The first seat automatically is allocated to the party
with the largest vote share, since the solution for all parties is simply the total number of votes
divided by 1. Table 7-1 is the seat allocation for Kayseri (DM=9) in 1995 (under the 5%
threshold). The total number of votes received by each party is listed in the marked row. Bolded
numbers show which party won the seat in question. For example, looking at the quotients
displayed in Row 3, those were used to determine the allocation of the third seat. In this case, the
RP, with a quotient equal to 74,800 was the largest. Whenever a party receives a seat, its
quotient is recalculated, using the new s; the RP's quotient is then recalculated with s=2 (it
already had one seat to begin with), giving it a quotient of 49,867. The process is then repeated,
comparing all the quotients all over again, until every seat is allocated. In this case, the CHP did
not win enough votes to receive any seats.
Table 6-5: D'Hondt Method: Kayseri 1995
Total Votes
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Total Seats
RP
149600
149600
74800
74800
49867
49867
49867
37400
37400
37400
29920
4
Kayseri 1995
Party
MHP
DYP
80522
65927
80522
65927
80522
65927
40261
65927
40261
65927
40261 32963.5
40261 32963.5
40261 32963.5
40261 32963.5
26841 32963.5
26841 32963.5
2
1
ANAP
64757
64757
64757
64757
64757
64757
32378.5
32378.5
32378.5
32378.5
32378.5
1
DSP
47776
47776
47776
47776
47776
47776
47776
47776
23888
23888
23888
1
CHP
30502
30502
30502
30502
30502
30502
30502
30502
30502
30502
30502
0
130
This method of seat allocation is very tedious, especially when it is completed without an
automatic program to perform the successive quotients. For this reason, only the four districts
examined in this chapter are treated in the 5% threshold analysis.
Figure 6-5 displays vote and seat share in the four districts (Adiyamin, Bingol, Kayseri,
and Konya) from 1961-1977. Each data point represents the results for one party in a single
district. The horizontal axis displays the vote share the party won, while the vertical axis shows
the seat share the party received. The solid line represents perfect proportionality between vote
and seat shares, i.e. that a party received exactly the same amount of seats it won as votes. When
a data point is positioned above the solid line, it means the party received more seats than votes;
when the data point is below the solid line, it means the opposite- that the party received fewer
seats than it won in votes. The dashed line displays the regression line to these results. These
show the election results without any nationwide threshold. Even though the line deviates from
perfect proportionality, the small DM districts drive much of the deviation (because parties either
received seat bonuses greater than their vote share or received no seats at all due to the few
number of seats in play). While there are a number of parties that do not receive any seats, the
vast majority of them are small DM districts (circles), or they received less than 10% of the
district's votes. The medium and large DM districts align much closer to perfect proportionality
than the small DM districts, as they have more seats to divide among all the competing parties.
There is only one district in which a party wins all of the seats, Bingol in 1961. The district
magnitude of Bingol is 2, and so this disproportionality is expected in such a small DM.
131
Figure 6-5: 1961-1977 Vote and Seat Share for Select Districts, T=0
Note: DM<5 circles, DM>4 &<9 triangles, DM>8 squares, and the line in each graph is the V=S line or
perfect proportionality line, not a regression line; the dashed line is the fitted line to the data
The election results from 1983-2007 are used for the next two analyses. First, I show the
actual vote and seat share under the 10% threshold. Then I examine the vote share with a
hypothetical 5% national threshold instead. For the purposes of this analysis, I only include the
results from parties that have reached the 5% threshold. There are a number of parties that are
excluded from this analysis, but all of their data points would lie on the horizontal line at Seat
Share=0. Figure 6-6 displays the election results for Adiyamin, Bingol, Kayseri and Konya for
1983-2007. The 10% threshold is in place, and so greater disproportionality is expected. Again,
the solid line represents perfect proportionality, while the dashed line shows the trend line for the
132
data. The first observation is that there are many more parties that do not receive any seats in
these districts. The majority of points in which the party received no seats were in small DM
Whereas before 1980 the parties that were left out appeared mostly in small DM districts, the
DM is not as powerful a predictor when there is a large threshold in place. In both large DM and
medium DM, in addition to small DM districts, parties that win up to 30% of the district vote are
barred from entry. The trend line lies far from the perfect proportionality line, and is driven by
parties that receive either all of the seats (which occurs even when the party wins as little as 30%
of the district vote, and happens in large DM districts more frequently than previously and in
small DM districts as well) or none. Indeed few parties received seat shares equivalent to their
vote shares. The situations in which this did occur (where V=S) are when the DM is larger than
four and the party receives between 5% and 25% of the district vote. Although the trend line
does "fit" the data in the sense that the endpoints of the line match the general relationship in the
results, very few of the data points actually lie on the line. The only cases in which the results
aligned perfectly with the trend line are within either small or large DM districts when the party
won between 10% and 40% of the vote.
133
Figure 6-6: 10% Threshold- 1983-2007
Note: DM<5 circles, DM>4 &<9 triangles, DM>8 squares, and the line in each graph is the V=S line or
perfect proportionality line, not a regression line; the dashed line is the fitted line to the data
Figure 6-7 displays the results from the counterfactual analysis. How does the translation
of votes into seats change when the threshold is lowered to 5% of the nationwide votes?
While
there are still parties that receive no seats, these data points represent the parties that won
fewer
than 20% of the vote share, and are either from small DM districts (and receive up to 20%
of the
votes in those districts) or from large DM districts, in which they receive less than 10%
of the
district vote. The data fit the trend line (again, the dashed line, while the solid line is the perfect
proportionality line) much better than the results with the 10% threshold.
134
Figure 6-7: 1983-2007 Results with 5% Election Threshold
Note: DM<5 circles, DM>4 &<9 triangles, DM>8 squares, and the line in each graph is the V=S line or
perfect proportionality line, not a regression line; the dashed line is the fitted line to the data
The districts that fall far from the trend line are all small DM districts (and all have
DM=3), in which the seats cannot be parsed out to many parties, and so have higher levels of
disproportionality. The small DM districts are driving the trend farther away from perfect
proportionality. Dropping these four data points from the analysis results in a much clearer
picture and is displayed in Figure 6-8.
135
Figure 6-8: 5% Threshold with trimmed results
/I7aL
/
.- / // /
A
/xe00
711
./
U~
S
A
0% a
Note: DM<5 circles, DM>4 &<9 triangles, DM>8 squares, and the line in each graph is the V=S line or
perfect proportionality line, not a regression line; the dashed line is the fitted line to the data
Thus far, the election threshold has proved to be a mechanism by which vote shares are
transformed into seats very poorly. Not only does the overall trend vary greatly from the
principle of proportionality, but also at the district level very few parties receive seat shares
proportional to their vote shares. Even by decreasing the threshold to 5%, I have demonstrated
that a much higher level of proportionality is reached, without removing the threshold
completely. In this way, the number of parties entering government in Turkey will still be
limited, but the parties who do receive seats will be more equally distributed according to their
relative popularity.
136
To illustrate the change in vote representation in the Grand National Assembly, I define a
value, R, representation, which is the sum of the proportion of votes for each party that wins
seats in the parliament, at the district level.
P=i
Representation formula where i corresponds to each party p to party n
(the parties whose vote shares result in seats) and V, is the percentage of
votes for each party that meet the above criteria.
It was not possible to complete the full calculation of vote representation at the national
level, but the levels of representation for the four districts illustrated above are presented in Table
6-6 below. Under "Actual R," R is displayed for the true seat distribution (the 1961-1987
elections are shown in the top half of the column, while the 1983-2007 elections are displayed in
the bottom half). The bottom half of the table is broken into two different thresholds- 10% and
5%, and the columns are labeled as such. Note that R for 1983 does not change depending on the
threshold- since the regime limited the number of parties that were allowed to participate, and all
of them exceeded the 10% threshold, all of the parties who won seats are the same in both
situations and R does not vary. R from 1961 and 1977 is the lowest in the districts with the
smallest DM, with corresponding increases as DM increases. The districts with the highest R
have the largest DM as well, especially before 1983. In 1983, R remains high, but beginning in
1987, R lowers significantly across all four districts. R in all districts drops as low as 27.2% (in
1991 in Adiyamin), meaning that only 27% of the votes cast in Adiyamin actually resulted in
seats in the Grand National Assembly.
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Table 6-6: Representation in Select Districts
Bingol
Adiyamin
Kayseri
Konya
Bingol
Adiyamin
Kayseri
Konya
RIT=10
RIT=5
AR
DM
RIT=10
RIT=5
AR
DM
RIT=10
RIT=5
AR
DM
RIT=10
RIT=5
AR
DM
RIT=0
DM=2
RIT=0
DM=4
RIT=0
DM=8
RIT=0
DM=16
1983
44.2
44.2
0.0
2
99.9
99.9
0.0
4
97.2
97.2
0.0
6
97.7
97.7
0.0
13
1961
1965
1969
1973
1977
54.6
66.6
64.6
48.8
55.0
86.4
80.5
80.9
83.5
89.8
86.3
94.8
92.4
85.1
89.3
100.0
90.8
92.8
94.4
95.7
1987 -73.1
80.2
7.1
3
32.9
80.3
47.4
4
44.7
85.6
40.9
8
55.5
94.1
38.6
14
1991 -62.6
80.5
17.9
3
27.2
97.3
70.1
4
31.6
92.1
60.5
7
79.0
99.5
20.5
13
1995
51.6
51.6
0.0
3
76.9
76.9
0.0
5
72.6
90.4
17.8
9
83.7
95.7
12.0
16
1999
38.9
38.9
0.0
3
65.6
77.7
12.1
6
81.8
72.2
-9.5
8
87.9
93.2
5.3
16
2002
31.6
53.7
22.1
3
54.9
66.9
12.0
5
65.4
76.8
11.4
8
63.5
80.2
16.7
16
2007
71.5
71.5
0.0
3
79.2
79.2
0.0
5
90.9
90.9
0.0
8
86.4
92.3
5.9
16
Comparing R for the post-1983 elections across the two different threshold levels
displays large improvements by lowering the threshold to 5%. The only district in which pre and
post threshold levels do not have large disparities is Bingol- from 1961-1983, the DM is 2 and
beginning in 1987 it is 3; when the DM increases the representation levels also increases as well.
A number of the election results in Bingol do not have varying R for the different thresholds; the
small DM prevents seats from being distributed to more than a few parties, and so representation
can't be improved significantly by altering the national threshold.
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The greatest improvement in R occurs in the medium DM districts; R in Kayseri varies
from [31.60, 97.20] under the 10% threshold, while the range in R changes to [72.22, 97.20] with
a 5% threshold. For small DM districts, R varies from [27.20, 99.90] under the 10% threshold
and from [38.89, 99.90] with a 5% threshold. Note the improvement in Adiyamin: from a range
of [27.20, 79.20] (excluding the 1983 elections) following the enforced 10% threshold, to a range
of [66.90, 97.30] under a 5% threshold. The large DM district, Konya, doesn't show as
significant improvement on variation on R as in smaller districts, but there is noticeable increase.
Conclusion
By examining the individual election results for the Islamist party since 1973, an
important pattern emerges. The Constitutional Court banned the RP in 1998, the FP in 2001, and
brought the AKP to a vote on its legality in 2008. By aligning these Court decisions with the
election outcomes, there appears to be a connection between increasing success and Court bans.
There are other factors at work besides election results, but the persistent secular-nationalist
agenda pursued by the Turkish regime since its independence combined with the threat of
religious parties dominating the legislature provides sufficient evidence as to the political
ramifications of Islamist success.
The data from Turkey suggests that a universal mechanism like its national threshold has
a great deal of power when it is used to counteract the growing strength of a competitor. When,
however, the competitor becomes popular enough with the people, it can take advantage of the
mechanism to reap the rewards inherent in the election threshold. The universality of the
threshold as a mechanism means that the regime that installed it does not necessarily have direct
control over who receives the benefits or punishments of it.
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Chapter 7
The Implications of Manipulation
Analysis of election returns in Jordan and Turkey has revealed electoral mechanisms that
severely affect representation. In Jordan, the degree of malapportionment in any given district is
directly related to both turnout and IAF representation. In addition, the proportion of nationwide
voters in a given district is closely related to both turnout and IAF representation. The results
from Turkey reveal a great deal of misrepresentation as a direct result of the large national
election threshold. Installed to prevent opposition to the ruling regime from gaining power, both
of these mechanisms have their limits.
In this chapter I evaluate the consequences of malapportionment in Jordan and the
election threshold in Turkey. I examine a policy case study in Jordan that is of great significance:
laws regarding honor crimes. I discuss the limitations of Turkey's election threshold on
containing the opposition in light of the fact that the AKP, clearly a regime opponent, has
overcome the election threshold to prosper in the past decade. In the next section, I review the
effect of malapportionment on policy, using the case of honor crimes as an example. In both
countries, the regime has recently learned that building controlling mechanisms into an election
system will not necessary result in support for its agenda.
Jordanand Honor Crimes
While the top-level results from Jordan support the hypothesis that the Hashemite regime
maintains total control over the legislature, recent policy debates have suggested otherwise.
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Despite the regime's efforts to gain support for its agenda, there are areas of public policy on
which the interests of regime loyalists differ greatly from the regime's plans.
Through a discussion of the controversy surrounding honor crimes legislation in Jordan, I
examine the influence of electoral mechanisms in Jordan on policy reform. Since the Hashemite
court itself is responsible for allocating the House of Deputies seats, it is expected that the
policies that the King supports would be accepted, actually favored by those who benefit the
most from the districting. However, in this case, those who are considered "regime loyalists,"
"traditionalists," "tribalists," the most stalwart supporters of the Hashemites, are actually the
very same MPs who voted against the King's proposed changes to this law. Fadia Faqir, a
leading scholar on women's rights issues, focuses on the Arab and/or Muslim world's reaction to
women's rights movements.
A major issue dividing Jordan's political elites is the subject of honor crimes, which are
murders of women by their family members because it is believed they have brought dishonor to
the family name (by sexual promiscuity, rape, or even rumors). These crimes are unique from
"crimes of passion" that are prevalent in many legal systems, although they do result in lesser
punishment for the guilty parties. The crime is understood as "the social harm and loss of honor
caused by the women's behavior," in the words of Warrick (2005). These crimes are not just
found in Arab/Muslim countries, but have also been found in several U.S. states until the 1970s,
India and Brazil. In Jordan, honor crimes are not just found in conservative Islam but also
Christian communities as well as those governed overwhelmingly by tribal law rather than
religious law. In 90% of known cases of honor killings in Jordan, the murdered woman was
found to still be a virgin (Ghattas 1999).
141
The story behind honor crimes in Jordan serves as an example where authoritarians,
despite the lengths they go to in order to retain ultimate control over the legislative agenda,
cannot predict the course which policymaking goes. The election mechanism intended to make
the regime's priorities sail past the legislature's seemingly "rubber stamp" votes turned against
the Hashemites in this example.
MalapportionmentandRegime Loyalists
Analysis of malapportionment in Jordan has revealed that the rural, desert areas of Jordan
(essentially the entire country outside of Amman, Irbid, and Zarqa) are the primary beneficiaries
of malapportionment. This part of the country is significantly overrepresented in the House of
Deputies: in 2003, 38% of the nationwide population were represented by 65% of the Ministers
of Parliament, while 61% of Jordanians were represented by 35% of the members of the House
of Deputies. The motivation behind this misrepresentation is that the overrepresented regions are
the home of regime loyalists, while the urban areas hold the more extreme politicians. While the
urban political elites aren't necessarily opponents of the Hashemites (most Jordanians support
the royal family), they are formidable competitors to the traditional tribal elite outside the cities.
As a result, the urbanites don't hold power equal to their population share, relatively to the rest
of the country.
The distribution of seats leads one to believe that these tribal elites strongly support King
Abdallah II's political agenda, and work in concert with the appointed Upper House to ratify the
Royal Court's legislation. In the case of honor crimes, one of the foremost policy debates in the
country today, this is not the case. In fact, while the King wants to reform laws regarding
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perpetrators of honor crimes, the tribal elite votes against these proposed changes every time it
reaches the Lower House.
The Legal Background
Honor crimes are a looming issue in many places including Jordan (and other Arab
and/or Muslim countries), as the state of discussion about women's rights and domestic violence
has yet to reach the point where action can be taken to ameliorate the situation. In many of the
countries where honor crimes are a significant problem, laws governing these crimes are a
combination of Islamic Shari'alaw and laws passed down from colonial powers.
Article 6 in the Jordanian Constitution guarantees the rights of all Jordanian citizens
regardless of their gender, but Article 340 in the Penal Code contradicts this by saying: 'he who
discovers his wife or one of his female relatives committing adultery with another, and he kills,
wounds or injures one or both of them, is exempt from any penalty,' and later on states 'he who
discovers his wife, or one of his female ascendants or descendants or sisters with another in an
unlawful bed, and he kills, wounds or injures one or both of them, benefits from a reduction in
penalty' (Jordanian Penal Code, Number 16, 1960). In the reverse situation, if a woman finds her
husband with another woman, she does not have the same rights.
While these laws are usually linked back to Shari'a law by commentators and critics of
Muslim countries, they actually trace back to the 1810 French Penal Code. Most of these type of
laws stemming from the French Mandate in Lebanon have been changed since the end of
colonialism in the region, except several related to family and public conduct, including the one
described above in Jordan. These laws are present in many Arab and/or Muslim countries;
before signing on to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against
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Women, Bangladesh, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia and Kuwait all entered reservations
on one of the articles (which affirms equal rights for women in marriage and familial relations)
(CEDAW 2003).
In Islamic law, adultery is forbidden, but in order for punishment to be given (which is,
according to the Koran, 100 'medium' lashes in public for unmarried women and men and
stoning for married women and men), it must be established that the act took place by repeated
confessions, testimony by 4 eyewitnesses, or pregnancy. These, standards, however, are not met
in Jordan or other countries because the facts are not established; honor crimes in Jordan occur
without a trial (i.e., the woman is punished without any legal or court procedure).
While Article 340 was amended in 2001 to give women the right to benefit from
mitigating circumstances, many believe this has not had any real effect on the number of honor
crimes in Jordan. Since the level of punishment for committing an honor crime has not changed,
it is not surprising that the proliferation of honor crimes continues.
Warrick (2005) finds that while the majority of discussion of honor crimes in Jordan
stems from Article 340, most perpetrators of the crime use Article 98, which is actually similar to
the "crimes of passion" legislation in many countries today. To invoke Article 98, murderers do
not need to satisfy the requirement of catching the woman in the act of adultery in order to
prevent punishment; they merely need to be suspected of a bad act (Warrick 2005).
The two sides: Royals and Secularists v. Islamists and Conservatives
Somewhat surprisingly, the royal family is among the strongest supporters of revision of
honor crimes law to equate punishment with other murders. In 1998, the Jordanian National
Committee for Women, headed by Princess Basma (sister to the late King Hussein) appealed to
144
the government to change the law, while women activists in Jordan collected 15,000 signatures
to cancel Article 340. Rana Husseini, a prominent columnist for the Jordan Times, an English
language daily newspaper in Jordan, lead the petitioners, and continues to report honor crimes in
her newspaper (while Arabic-language newspapers either minimize coverage or fail to report
these events at all). There are also a number of prominent Islamic scholars in Jordan and
elsewhere that oppose the lack of punishment for honor crimes on the basis that any form of
murder violates the law of God.
The main opponents of punishment for perpetrators of honor crimes are found in two
groups: the Islamic Action Front Party and conservative sections of society. The IAF supports
honor crimes legislation, but actually prefers a more strict interpretation of Shari'alaw, which
requires that the crime be established by one or more of three types of evidence (from above,
confessions, four eyewitnesses, or pregnancy). IAF support is also based on the establishment of
the crime by a judge with at least one form of evidence, not in the way that it is currently
practiced in Jordan (or other countries, for that matter). So while this support for honor crimes
results in opposing increasing penalties for perpetrators, it does not mean that the IAF would
select the current process as their ideal.
The other group of opponents, coming mainly from the conservative tribal sectors of
society, maintains that repealing the law would permit sexual immorality and either that the law
actually does come from Shari'alaw or is simply legitimate because it serves the ultimate end of
public morality (Warrick 2005). It is these tribal conservatives who are also the greatest
beneficiaries of malapportionment. Because their districts are overrepresented in the House of
Deputies, they ultimately render the deciding votes. While in most questions of legislation,
especially funding, economic development, and general domestic policy, these loyalists would
145
have similar interests and considerations in mind as the Hashemite Court, honor crimes
legislation is one on which they differ. Because of their dedication to "traditional" patriarchal
society, where the male family members always hold the upper hand, and women have no power
or independence and are to be protected by the men, these loyalists have no interest in providing
the government with the power to prosecute an action that they don't perceive as a crime. The
belief that dishonor to the family name must be removed at all costs guides their thought process.
In their minds, the murder of a sister, aunt, or daughter because she is believed to have acted
"shamefully" (which is a very subjective accusation in the first place, regardless of what type of
proof, if any, exists) is justified by the necessity to keep the family name free of scandal. It is not
murder so much as it is a "house cleaning" of sorts.
Campaignsfor Change
The regime has tried repeatedly to increase the punishment of honor crimes to the
standard of other forms of murder, once in 1999, then in 2001, then in 2003, all to no avail. In
each instance, the King (either Hussein or Abdallah II) proposed the changes, supported by the
upper House of Parliament, sent it on to the House of Deputies, which then voted down the law.
Unfortunately, greater detail than the overall result is impossible to find: there exists no public
record of the vote results in any of these cases. While it is safe to assume that every member of
the Islamic Action Front voted against repealing Article 340, it is difficult to speculate beyond
that. However, many of the regions that are overrepresented in the House of Deputies are home
to the "conservative" sectors of society that Warrick (2005) alludes to in her analysis.
It is quite surprising that despite the support that the royal family, political elite, and
prominent Islamist and secular scholars have for amending Article 340, little has been done.
146
Although the king retains the last word on matters of policy and law (officially), both King
Hussein and King Abdallah II have demonstrated restraint in overruling parliamentary decisions.
Despite the mechanisms for control highlighted earlier, and the perceived threats by Islamists
and Palestinians, and in spite of pressure by the United States and other allies to liberalize, the
Hashemites have chosen the "people's choice" over improved human rights and policy
liberalization (although accepting the House of Deputies decisions is an improvement in the
liberalization path, even if it is not in the direction of liberal policies). If anything, the movement
for change on this issue has generated greater public discourse on the issue. Whereas at one time
only one journalist, in one newspaper, was writing about these cases, they are now covered much
more equally among the Jordanian press as well as many prominent Jordanian blogs.
International awareness of honor crimes in Jordan has also increased since the grassroots
movement.
At the same time, however, overrepresentation of the traditionalist sectors of Jordanian
society has contributed to the failure of proposals like honor crimes legislation. By inflating the
voting power of these constituencies, the Royal Court is working against itself, despite its efforts
to get this legislation passed. Were the seats to be distributed with greater attention to population
distribution, it is possible that revisions to Article 340 and 98 would be law by now. In regions
that have three times the population share than seat share, like Amman, proper apportionment
would result in policy making that is more representative of both average Jordanian citizens and
the Royal Court.
Some would argue that since the regime in Jordan is not interested in proportionally
representing its people in the legislature to begin, it should just have districts with the same
number of seats, like in the United States Senate. In this scenario, urban areas would still be
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underrepresented according to a consensual model of democracy, but representatives of each
district or governorate would hold equal power in relation to other districts. The ultimate goal of
the regime (increased representation of its loyalists) would be met, and the appropriate model of
democracy would also be satisfied.
Thresholds and Representation
The analysis provided in Chapter 6 demonstrated that the 10% election threshold in
Turkey has significant effects on representation. While this analysis did not examine the policy
implications or government effectiveness as a result of Turkey's electoral system design, the
results provide compelling evidence that Turkey's system is not representative of its citizens'
preferences, despite its PR, multi-party electoral design. Even though this analysis did not
reallocate all of Turkey's 550 seats using the 5% threshold, the patterns found in the selected
districts carry over to all other districts. Lowering the national threshold to 5% increases the
number of parties that participate in the government.
For the most part, Turkey follows the consensual model of democracy. By using a
proportional representation electoral system, and concentrating the majority of power in its
legislature, as opposed to an executive, Turkey's governmental structure appears to subscribing
to an inclusive political structure. Constitutional Court party bans and the high election
threshold, however, weaken the ability of political parties to appeal to a diverse agenda, and
decrease the level of representation in the Grand National Assembly.
Table 7-1 displays the actual and hypothetical number of parties participating in the
Parliament with the two election thresholds. Under the 10% threshold, there are never more than
5 parties present in the Assembly; the 5% threshold increases the number of parties for almost
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every election, with a maximum of 7 parties participating in the 2002-2007 Assembly. The large
number of parties permitted under the 5% threshold brings up questions separate from
representation, namely the efficiency and ease with which coalitions are built under more
complicated circumstances.
Table 7-1: Number of Parties in the Grand National Assembly
1983
1987
1991
1995
1999
2002
2007
Participated in
Elections
3
7
6
12
20
18
13
Number of Parties
10% Threshold
5% Threshold
3
3
3
4
5
5
6
5
5
6
2
7
3
4
Although it is safe to assume that disproportionality does not completely disappear when
the election threshold is lowered, representation is improved with a lower threshold. To examine
the effect of the threshold on government effectiveness and efficiency, it would be helpful to
compare the governments from 1961-1977, in which there was no election threshold and
multiple parties winning seats (up to 8) in the Grand National Assembly, with the post-1983
governments.
In addition to decreasing the number of parties permitted to participate in government,
the election threshold has a significant impact on the translation of votes into seats. It is not
guaranteed that all votes will be represented in the parliament. The principle behind proportional
representation is that voters' preferences are more represented in the legislature than in
majoritarian systems, where the election formula is first past the post. The legislative
consequences of this high degree of misrepresentation are unexamined, as yet.
149
The election threshold was installed to prevent opposition parties, specifically religious or
ethnicity-oriented organizations, from gaining representation. The regime, however, failed to
factor in the effect of popular support for these parties. It assumed that platforms like those of the
AKP and HADEP would never garner greater support among Turks than those of the secular
nationalist parties. In doing so, the regime failed to protect itself if one of their opponents
became a favorite among the people, as the AKP has clearly demonstrated. As it is no longer an
outsider, the AKP has taken advantage of the power of the threshold to enhance representation of
the largest parties (previously limited to regime loyalists like the CHP), and in the process has
demoted long time supporters of the military regime to minority status.
In Chapter 6, I studied the effect of the election threshold on representation in Turkey's
Grand National Assembly. The threshold gives generous seat bonuses to the most successful
parties. Smaller parties, if they can reach the 10% threshold, receive much smaller seat shares
compared to their vote share. Because of the large variation in district magnitude, the disparity
between vote share and seat share varies a great deal as well. Seat distribution in small districts
results in a greater disparity between vote and seat share, but does not actually result in many
additional seats for the most successful party (since there aren't many seats to be distributed),
while the vote-seat disparity in large districts may not be very large and yet provide many seat
bonuses to the largest party.
Until 1983, the military regime intervened when politics strayed from the secular,
nationalist agenda envisioned by Turkey's founder. The introduction of the election threshold
allowed the regime to avoid direct intervention but retain control over electoral politics for the
most part. Because of the universal effect this mechanism has it represses the least popular
parties and enhances the most popular ones, regardless of their political platform or affiliation
150
with the ruling regime. As a result, the functionality of this mechanism in the regime's favor
depended upon the continued minority status of its opponents. When opposing parties became
more popular among the people, however, the regime had no mechanism in place to intervene,
besides the Constitutional Court (the majority party is the only organization that can bring a
party to it).
This chapter has examined the effectiveness of election mechanisms in their ability to
repress opponents and enhance loyalists. Evidence from both countries suggests that,
surprisingly, the utility of these mechanisms have their limits. Election mechanisms, regardless
of who installs them, do not necessarily take the place of an unelected regime in controlling
outcomes. In the case of Jordan, the regime's loyalists on most issues diverge in opinion on some
of the most divisive policies. Despite the popular, elite, and royal support for increasing penalties
for honor crimes, the tribal elites (both Muslims and Christians alike), because of their
overrepresentation in the House of Deputies, are successful in preventing the law to change. The
king's allies disagree with the regime on this key issue, one that has put Jordan in the
international spotlight.
The mechanism in Turkey, the election threshold, has a universal effect on election
results. Because of this universality, the regime that installed it cannot effectively target a single
party or opposition group. The checks and balances built into Turkey's governmental structure
require members of the legislature itself to bring a party to the Constitutional Court for a hearing.
As preferences of the public change, the threshold affects different parties: the most popular
parties receive generous seat bonuses, while the least popular parties are relegated to minority
status (in some cases they receive no seats at all).
151
Chapter 8
Containing the Opposition
Summary
The analysis provided here has made significant headway into specific incidences of
electoral "engineering." The cases of Jordan and Turkey present different challenges to
researchers, while holding constant a few common themes: strong nationalist agendas by the
governing regime, movements towards liberalization (despite the motivations, the effort is there),
and a strict interpretation in law and elite discourse of what it means to be "Jordanian" or
"Turkish." While these definitions appear broad and inclusive towards all of their citizens, it is
clear that the failure of these governments to recognize some ethnic minorities has been
detrimental to the political development of both countries. In Turkey's case, the Kurds have
resorted to terrorism and violence to demand autonomy, while in Jordan the PalestinianJordanians have relinquished the right to claim their primary source of identity as well as
compromising the Arab-Israeli peace process (of course, depending upon whose side one stands,
that could be a positive effect).
For both countries, the pressure from the U.S. and European allies has clearly been a
motivating factor for liberalization: Jordan's dependence on American aid and support, as well as
its friendly, if not controversial, relationship with Israel promotes its security and stability in the
region. Turkey has also accepted generous aid from the United States as well as European
countries, and its bid to become a full member of the European Union has been hampered by its
recognition issues as well as its frequent interventions in electoral affairs by the military and the
Constitutional Court.
152
In Jordan, the House of Deputies' seats are not distributed along any type of
"proportional" system. Rural, traditionalists and regime loyalists are overrepresented, while
urban secularists (as well as Islamists) are underrepresented. The SNTV electoral system inhibits
vote representation significantly. However, if one were to allocate its House of Deputies seats
according to population, Amman would hold 37% of the total seats in the House of Deputies (it
currently has 22%) and Irbid would have 19% of the total seats (it holds 15% today), which
would drastically alter the makeup of the parliament. Most of the other constituencies would
hold between 1 and 5% of the seats in the House of Deputies. With such a large concentration of
seats in two governorates, it would be fairly easy for these two constituencies (although, since
they are both urban centers, they have very similar interests, so they are really only one
constituency) to command control of the House of Deputies, which would compromise the
urgent economic needs of the rural and desert regions in Jordan.
The case study of honor crimes in Jordan has highlighted the implications of inflating the
power of some constituencies while repressing others through overt tactics. In Jordan, it is well
known and acknowledged (outside of the Royal Hashemite Court, at least) that its path of
defensive democratization is inhibiting liberalization. At the same time, however, the example
honor crimes legislation demonstrates that in the area of policymaking, the Hashemite court has
restrained itself from forcing policy change on an unwilling House of Deputies. While the
outcome of this restraint, namely the continued lack of punishment for perpetrators of honor
crimes, is unfavorable in the view of women's rights supporters and Jordan's Western allies, it
shines a positive light on the prospect for true democracy in Jordan.
Turkey, on the other hand, is facing slightly different pressures. It is the proactive actions
of the regime, party bans, military coups, and unfairly high thresholds for representation that are
153
preventing it from reaching a state of democracy. However, the recent success of the AKP has
changed the political landscape recently: parties that previously would not even consider
appealing to the Kurdish minority in political campaigns are actively soliciting their vote with
promises to recognize their ethnic heritage. In the past, Turkey's government written policies so
secular that many constituencies, namely women and Kurds, are prohibited from freedom of
expression through language bans and headscarf bans. The effect of the threshold has elucidated
the disproportionality inherent in this election mechanism. This impact is felt throughout the
country, not simply in small DM districts or by supporters of a single party. The threshold
inflates the success of the most vote-winning parties while stifling the voices of smaller parties,
to the point where sometimes only a minority of votes are represented in the parliament. The
principles of PR systems require that a majority of voters' voices are represented in the
legislature, and the 10% threshold is demonstrably exclusionary.
Discussion
The results in both countries have provided new perspectives on the purpose and function
of elections. Turkey's case study did not examine the policy implications of misrepresentation
as a result of the election threshold, although this step can be effectively approached in the
future. In Jordan, a more rigorous study of the policy implications of its misrepresentation
would enhance studies on malapportionment greatly, although the data limitations prevent this
analysis today.
Norris (2004) and Lijphart (1999) assert that electoral systems are engineered to suit the
country in question. While the characteristics of states and election mechanisms used in each
country are without a doubt different and specific to each case, the concept of representation is
154
universal to all systems. The case of Turkey demonstrates that in some countries, on the outside
its commitment to representation is clear, but the fundamental principle of democratic
governance is being violated. When the cardinal criterion for elected governments is debased, the
entire system is doubted. Jordan's quasi-democratic state exemplifies the way in which the
goals of government designers misshape the representation of its citizens' preferences to appease
its loyalists. At the same time, when the authoritarian ruler of a democratizing state chooses to
respect the opinions of its elected policymakers, despite the ramifications, it gives hope to the
overarching concept of democracy.
Although in both countries, voters go to the polls every few years to elect their
representatives, the mechanisms at work as the voters cast their ballots are effectively removing
many of their votes from the count. Because malapportionment's effects are relative, meaning
that it hurts specific voters while benefiting others, it is quite straightforward to measure. While
Jordan's mechanism, malapportionment, is overt and relatively easy to identify (a simple
comparison of seat share and population share has sufficed), the mechanism in Turkey is subtler.
Because the election threshold is applied across the entire country, its effects do not appear to be
focused on any specific group or region. By selecting a single party, however, and analyzing its
results year by year, the full impact of the threshold has proven that its effects are widespread.
Voters across the country are rendered voiceless because their chosen parties are "too small," as
scored on Turkey's subjective scale.
In Jordan's case, it is probably not all that surprising that its electoral system is so
unrepresentative. The driving force that has made it one of the most stable countries in the
Middle East is the steadiness, strength and legitimacy of the Hashemite Royal Family. Despite
his strict method of rule, frequent dismissal of parliament and imposition of martial law, King
155
Hussein is still memorialized by most Jordanians: pictures of him adorn the windows of taxi
cabs, graffiti in Amman praises him, and his son, Abdallah II, has received similar admiration.
The fact of the matter is that Jordan is not, by any measure, a democracy, regardless of the
quality of its electoral system.
The results in Turkey, on the other hand may be a surprise to many. Its long history with
democratically elected governments portrays the image of one of the oldest democracies in its
region of the world, especially when one overlooks the multiple military coups staged in the past
half century. Despite the history of free and competitive elections and the abundance of election
data, the willingness to characterize Turkey as a "democracy" is hindered by its trigger-happy
military, proactive Constitutional Court, and prohibitively high barriers to representation.
The analysis of these two countries has contributed to the literature surrounding electoral
engineering. First and foremost, the example of Jordan has demonstrated that despite severe data
limitations, powerful results can be generated if the data is properly utilized. Jordan's precarious
place in the world is contingent on several strong relationships, and while installing an election
system has appeased many of their lenders, the system is not necessarily fair. The discussion of
honor crimes legislation has exemplified the somewhat odd relationship between the monarchy
and the public. Typically one would expect the monarchy to be the "traditionalist," while the
public is the progressive visionary; this is not the case. It is the Hashemites who are the
advocates, along with prominent journalists, Islamic scholars, and secularists, for improving the
status of women in their country, while the regime "loyalists", indeed the same group who is
benefiting from malapportionment, are the opponents to change. Despite the difference of
opinion, and the great willingness for its laws to change, the monarchy has not overturned (or
156
even suspended) House of Deputies policy for several years (and does not appear to be interested
in doing so in the near future).
Turkey's analysis has provided further evidence that election thresholds result in high
levels of disproportionality. Because Turkey's Grand National Assembly is so large, however,
lowering the threshold, even to a 5% level, greatly improve the degree of representation and
improve the translation of votes into seats. The threshold distorts vote and seat share at the
highest level in small DM districts, but the greatest impact (in terms of absolute number of seats)
is felt in the medium and large DM districts; since these districts have more seats at play, a 15%
seat share increase could result in additional seats for the party in question, while that same
addition will not benefit representation in small DM districts. The portion of the counterfactual
analysis with the most unpredictable consequences is the number of parties. The increase in
party participation in the Turkish government also requires greater compromise and coalition
building, and as the number of parties increases, the likelihood that an efficient government is
formed lessens.
For those interested in the effects of specific mechanisms, both studies take advantage of
creative angles at which to analyze the implications for representation. While in places like the
United States there is a plethora of state level, as well as nationwide level, data that can be
compared to almost any other variable, be it Congressional representation, roll call voting, or
public opinion, in many cases the availability of that kind of information for other countries,
especially those in the developing world, is scarce. Maximizing the utility of whatever
information is available is the key to understanding and explaining the effect of an individual
mechanism within an electoral system.
157
Appendix A
Notes on Data Collection
To answer the research question I posed, certain information is necessary. For the two
countries in question, slightly different data is crucial to examining the effects of election
mechanisms on representation. To examine malapportionment in an electoral system, districtlevel election results and census data are necessary, while district-level turnout and roll call votes
would enhance the degree of analysis. In order to complete a review of the effect of the election
threshold on a system's representation, district-level election results for both the winning and the
losing candidates are necessary, while information on census data and turnout would improve the
research.
As a consequence of limited data availability, I could not conduct several analyses that I
had originally planned to. There is no ethnic or religious data available for either country other
than the CIA World Factbook's general information. The censuses in Jordan and Turkey only
collect data about age and gender of Jordanians. While this information is available at the
governorate level, it is not available for electoral districts alone in Jordan.
An original research goal for the analysis on Jordan was to create a map of population
density for each election, and to superimpose district-level malapportionment data to display
exactly where and how representation was compromised. The closest data to an electoral map I
could locate was a list of villages and tribes included in the 1989 seat allocations. However, since
the districting changed at least twice since then, this information is not helpful. Because the 1989
election data are not available either, I didn't extend my analysis prior to 1993.
Among the data limitations, the most significant was with Jordan's election results. After
the votes have been counted, the only information that is available to the public is the list of
158
winning candidates (and their party affiliations, if any). A think tank in Jordan, called Al Urdun
Al Jadid Research Center (URJC, or The New Jordan Research Center), publishes a book that
compiles the election results and biographical information for each MP. This data consist of the
vote share of each winning candidate, the total number of votes cast in election district and
governorate, the total number of candidates in each district, and turnout for each district. The
number of candidates seems like a helpful piece of information, but it doesn't provide
information on their affiliation, which seat each ran for, or each candidate's vote share. The
turnout information is generally helpful, but there are a few issues with it. For one, in some
districts, the turnout is actually higher than 100%. This is because the population information
they use is out of date. There is absolutely no information on the unsuccessful candidates beyond
knowing the total vote share for them (simply by subtracting the winning candidates' vote shares
from the total number of votes cast).
There is much more information available on Turkey's elections. However, the data
caused a different set of issues all together. Because of the size of Turkey's legislature (several
hundred MPs, divided amongst 75-85 districts), there was a great deal of information needed to
conduct district-level analysis. All in all, I collected twelve elections' results, which included the
vote share and seat share for each party in each election (in several elections, 12-20 parties
participated), in each district. The data was not available in a preexisting dataset digital, and as a
result, most of it was collected from books or websites dedicated to elections in Turkey. I entered
the data manually. This data entry took about three months to complete. The available data for
Jordan was purchased in Jordan, mailed to me (in both English and Arabic), and then I entered
manually into a dataset; this data entry took me a month.
159
Initially, I had planned to analyze the roll call votes for honour crimes legislation in
Jordan. My original idea was to compare the vote against the malapportionment score for each
seat, with the finding affirming that the overrepresented districts voted against increasing the
penalties (and the IAF, of course, voting against it) and the underrepresented districts voting in
favor of changing the law. However, I quickly came to the conclusion that roll call votes are not
collected in Jordan. A solution to this problem is going to the House during the votes, in the hope
that seeing it in action will provide the proper information.
In the counterfactual analysis for Turkey, I had wanted to use all post-1983 election
results under the 5% threshold. However, since the only way to conduct the D'Hondt method of
seat allocation is manually, one seat (and one district) at a time, reallocating 550 seats in an 85district legislature (where the district magnitude of a single district reaches 30 in some cases) is
complicated, and so could not be completed within the confines of this research. Despite the data
limitation, however, I believe that the analysis provided here has demonstrated quite well the
degree of misrepresentation in each country's electoral system. I tried to use each piece of data to
demonstrate the role of each mechanism in elections. Those interested in obtaining the datasets
for either country are encouraged to contact me.
160
Appendix B
Table B-1: The 1993 House of Deputies ElectionTumout and Malapportionment
District
1
1
2
3
4
5
6
1
1
2
3
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
Governorate
AJLOUN
AMMAN
AMMAN
AMMAN
AMMAN
AMMAN
AMMAN
BALQAA
BEDOUIN
BEDOUIN
BEDOUIN
IRBID
JERASH
KERAK
MA'AN
MAFRAQ
NJVK
RBK
TAFILEH
ZARQA
JORDAN
Turnout
68.0%
28.0%
18.7%
33.2%
51.3%
42.2%
49.5%
60.6%
44.2%
77.5%
61.0%
39.5%
47.4%
71.9%
60.2%
49.5%
51.5%
57.1%
63.7%
30.0%
42.0%
% of Eligible
Voters
2.2%
6.8%
11.7%
7.3%
4.1%
5.6%
3.0%
6.2%
1.8%
1.4%
1.4%
12.3%
3.0%
4.2%
2.3%
2.4%
3.7%
3.5%
1.6%
15.6%
% of
Parliament
3.8%
3.8%
3.8%
6.3%
2.5%
6.3%
3.8%
10.0%
2.5%
2.5%
2.5%
11.3%
2.5%
11.3%
6.3%
3.8%
2.5%
3.8%
3.8%
7.5%
161
Table B-2: The 1997 House of Deputies ElectionTurnout and Malapportionment
District
1
1
2
3
4
5
1
1
1
2
3
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
Govemorate
AJLOUN
AMMAN
AMMAN
AMMAN
AMMAN
AMMAN
AQABA
BALQAA
BEDOUIN
BEDOUIN
BEDOUIN
IRBID
JERASH
KERAK
MA'AN
MADABA
MAFRAQ
NJVK
RBK
TAFILEH
ZARQA
JORDAN
Turnout -57.9%
23.3%
20.7%
23.7%
28.1%
35.4%
60.8%
48.0%
59.7%
64.0%
70.5%
50.1%
64.7%
70.5%
67.9%
61.8%
60.6%
60.0%
60.2%
70.9%
27.5%
43.6%
% of Eligible
% of
Voters
-- Parliament
2.3%
3.8%
7.7%
3.8%
12.4%
3.8%
3.9%
6.3%
4.7%
2.5%
8.7%
6.3%
1.7%
2.5%
6.8%
10.0%
1.1%
2.5%
1.5%
2.5%
1.2%
2.5%
11.1%
11.3%
3.0%
2.5%
4.0%
11.3%
1.4%
3.8%
2.5%
3.8%
2.3%
3.8%
3.5%
2.5%
3.4%
3.8%
1.3%
3.8%
15.5%
7.5%
162
Table B-3: The 2003 House of Deputies ElectionTurnout and Malapportionment
District
AMMAN 1
AMMAN 2
AMMAN 3
AMMAN 4
AMMAN 5
AMMAN 6
AMMAN 7
IRBID 1
IRBID 2
IRBID 3
IRBID 4
IRBID 5
IRBID 6
IRBID 7
IRBID 8
IRBID 9
BALQA 1
BALQA 2
BALQA 3
BALQA 4
KERAK 1
KERAK 2
KERAK3
Turnout
41.90%
40.60%
41.90%
51.40%
32.50%
49.40%
68.90%
57.00%
66.80%
76.50%
80.50%
73.50%
74.90%
78.20%
80.10%
84.60%
76.50%
70.00%
79.30%
57.40%
77.70%
78.20%
83.40%
% of
V
7.00%
8.80%
6.70%
5.90%
4.80%
3.30%
1.10%
7.60%
2.00%
0.90%
1.80%
1.70%
1.70%
1.70%
0.60%
0.50%
3.40%
0.80%
1.00%
2.10%
1.50%
0.60%
1.10%
% of
P
3.80%
3.80%
4.80%
2.90%
2.90%
2.90%
1.00%
3.80%
2.90%
1.00%
1.90%
1.90%
1.00%
1.00%
1.00%
1.00%
6.70%
1.00%
1.00%
1.00%
2.90%
1.90%
1.90%
District
KERAK 4
KERAK 5
KERAK 6
ZARQA 1
ZARQA 2
ZARQA 3
ZARQA 4
MAFRAQ 1
JERASH 1
AJLOUN 1
AJLOUN 2
MADABA 1
MADABA 2
TAFILEH 1
TAFILEH 2
MAAN 1
MAAN 2
MAAN 3
AQABA 1
BEDOUIN 2
BEDOUIN 1
BEDOUIN 3
JORDAN
Turnout
89.30%
86.30%
88.40%
45.20%
56.80%
70.90%
43.30%
81.80%
82.50%
79.90%
82.00%
76.00%
85.90%
81.60%
84.00%
74.20%
75.30%
86.50%
63.20%
84.20%
84.50%
79.40%
58.90%
% of
V
0.60%
0.40%
0.30%
6.20%
2.10%
0.80%
4.30%
2.70%
2.60%
2.00%
0.60%
1.90%
0.70%
1.10%
0.40%
0.80%
0.30%
0.40%
1.10%
1.60%
1.20%
1.20%
100.00%
% of
P
1.00%
1.00%
1.00%
3.80%
2.90%
1.00%
1.90%
3.80%
3.80%
2.90%
1.00%
2.90%
1.00%
2.90%
1.00%
1.90%
1.00%
1.00%
1.90%
2.90%
2.90%
2.90%
100.00%
163
Appendix C
Table C-1: Turkey 1961-1977 Elections
(Esmer and Sayari 2002, Adam Carr 2008)
Year
1961
1961
1961
1961
1961
1965
1965
1965
1965
1965
1965
1965
1969
1969
1969
1969
1969
1969
1969
1969
1969
Party
IND
YTP
CKMP
AP
CHP
CKMP
TIP
IND
YTP
MP
CHP
AP
YTP
TIP
TBP
MHP
MP
IND
CGP
CHP
AP
Vote
Share
0.80%
13.70%
14.00%
34.80%
36.70%
2.20%
3.00%
3.20%
3.70%
6.30%
28.70%
52.90%
2.20%
2.70%
2.80%
3.00%
3.20%
5.60%
6.60%
27.40%
46.50%
Seat
Share
0.00%
14.44%
12.00%
35.11%
38.44%
2.44%
3.11%
0.22%
4.22%
6.89%
29.78%
53.33%
1.33%
0.44%
1.78%
0.22%
1.33%
2.89%
3.33%
31.78%
56.89%
Total
Seats
0
65
54
158
173
11
14
1
19
31
134
240
6
2
8
1
6
13
15
143
256
Year
1973
1973
1973
1973
1973
1973
1973
1973
1973
1977
1977
1977
1977
1977
1977
1977
1977
Party
OTHERS
TBP
IND
MHP
CGP
MSP
DKP
AP
CHP
OTHERS
DKP
CGP
IND
MHP
MSP
AP
CHP
Vote
Share
0.60%
1.10%
2.80%
3.40%
5.30%
11.80%
11.90%
29.80%
33.30%
0.50%
1.90%
1.90%
2.40%
6.40%
8.60%
36.90%
41.40%
Seat
Share
0.00%
0.22%
1.33%
0.67%
2.89%
10.67%
10.00%
33.11%
41.11%
0.00%
0.22%
0.67%
0.89%
3.56%
5.33%
42.00%
47.33%
Total
Seats
0
1
6
3
13
48
45
149
185
0
1
3
4
16
24
189
213
164
Table C-2: Turkey 1983-2007 Elections
(Esmer and Sayari 2002, Adam Carr 2008)
Year
1983
1983
1983
1983
1987
1987
1987
1987
1987
1987
1987
1987
1991
1991
1991
1991
1991
1991
1991
1995
1995
1995
1995
1995
1995
1995
1995
1995
Party
IND
MDP
HAP
ANAP
IND
MHP
OTHERS
RP
DSP
DYP
SHP
ANAP
IND
OTHERS
DSP
RP
SHP
ANAP
DYP
IND
OTHERS
HADEP
MHP
CHP
DSP
DYP
ANAP
RP
Vote
Share
1.10%
23.30%
30.50%
45.10%
0.40%
2.90%
3.90%
7.20%
8.50%
19.10%
24.70%
36.30%
0.10%
0.40%
10.80%
16.90%
20.80%
24.00%
27.10%
0.50%
1.60%
4.20%
8.20%
10.70%
14.60%
19.20%
19.70%
21.40%
Seat
Share
0.00%
17.79%
29.32%
52.88%
0.00%
0.00%
0.00%
0.00%
0.00%
13.11%
22.00%
64.89%
0.00%
0.00%
1.56%
13.78%
19.56%
25.56%
39.56%
0.00%
0.00%
0.00%
0.00%
8.91%
13.82%
24.55%
24.00%
28.73%
Total
Seats
0
71
117
211
0
0
0
0
0
59
99
292
0
0
7
62
88
115
178
0
0
0
0
49
76
135
132
158
Year
1999
1999
1999
1999
1999
1999
1999
1999
1999
2002
2002
2002
2002
2002
2002
2002
2002
2002
2007
2007
2007
2007
2007
2007
2007
Party
IND
HADEP
OTHERS
CHP
DYP
ANAP
FP
MHP
DSP
DSP
ANAP
DHP
MHP
OTHERS
GP
DYP
CHP
AKP
GP
OTHERS
IND
DP
MHP
CHP
AKP
Vote
Share
0.90%
4.80%
4.90%
8.70%
12.00%
13.20%
15.40%
17.90%
22.20%
1.20%
5.10%
6.20%
8.30%
8.60%
9.20%
9.50%
19.40%
34.30%
3.90%
4.50%
5.20%
5.40%
14.30%
20.80%
46.70%
Seat
Share
1.66%
0.00%
0.00%
0.00%
15.31%
16.24%
18.82%
23.25%
24.72%
0.00%
0.00%
0.00%
0.00%
1.64%
0.00%
0.00%
32.36%
66.00%
0.00%
0.00%
5.09%
0.00%
12.73%
20.18%
62.00%
Total
Seats
9
0
0
0
83
88
102
126
134
0
0
0
0
9
0
0
178
363
0
0
28
0
70
111
341
165
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