The Toss of a Coin: Electoral Policymaking in Turkey from 1980 to 2018

Abstract In this article, I analyze electoral engineering cases in Turkey between 1980 and 2018, showing that Turkish political parties and policymakers often failed to identify an optimal strategy regarding electoral reform in this period. The purpose of my study is to gather more data to improve understanding drivers of successful electoral policymaking. I first analyze all electoral engineering attempts after civil elections were restored in Turkey, starting with the country’s 1991 elections. I show that the political parties failed to identify an optimal electoral reform strategy roughly 54% of the time overall, while the failure rate was even higher, at 62.5%, among the parties that designed the reforms since 1991. I find that political parties have not been better off after careful deliberate decision making compared to simply tossing a coin. I compare reasons for such electoral engineering failures in Turkey—which include the volatility of votes under high electoral thresholds, the overestimation of electoral support, a lack of technical knowledge, the weak institutionalization of political parties, and a lack of reliable polls—with other cases in the literature to pave the way for future research. This article also can be interpreted as a replication of earlier research investigating electoral engineering in emerging democracies by applying a similar methodology on a longer time frame in an established democracy.