The GOOD, The BAD, and the UGLY:

Another Historic September 12th in Turkey

Ladies and Gentlemen!

September 12th will no longer be remembered solely as the notorious anniversary of the 1980 coup in Turkey. 30 years after the coup, we just had a referendum on the very same day! The subject of the referendum: whether or not to amend some articles of the 1982 Constitution.

The ballot itself was simple enough, with only two choices: Yes or No to the amendments.

And below are the results...

The yellow and red map here is used by the most popular Turkish daily, Hurriyet.

As seen from their dichotomous choice in colors, Hurriyet has a tendency to avoid nuances. It projects almost every political issue in Turkey as black and white! No matter how convoluted, layered and complicated the subject is...

From reading Hurriyet's analysis of the referendum results, an average reader would get the idea that Turkey is a terribly split country!

Just detach the coastal provinces neatly along the perforated lines...

I remember a similar color coding for the 2004 US election results, when G. W. Bush won the second time. The most popular US map that circulated around was showing the solid blue (Democrat) coastal states surrounding a massive red (Republican) continent in the center. In fact, some e-mail jokes circulated around for a while, showing the blue states uniting with Canada in a larger "United States of Canada" and the red states alone establishing the "United States of Jesus!"

The Turkish map above in many ways harks back to that kind of a US style stereotyping in the form of "culture wars". The country at hand is split between the enlightened, progressive and more affluent coastal voters, and the lesser- educated, conservative and more rural voters of the heartland.

Based on the referendum results, Hurriyet and most of its columnists paint a black and white picture of Turkey: From their perspective, the enlightened coastal region voters bravely casted "No!" votes, and thus, tried to prevent the looming threat of Islamic authoritarianism, whereas the dull-witted conservatives in the Anatolian heartland and the poor, gullible Kurds of the East spoiled the whole thing by saying "Yes!"

No need to read the rest, if you buy this interpretation.

Now, if you are still with me, let's try to paint the same results with slightly more subtlety. Below map might be somewhat more informative, for it provides us the "shades" of Yes and No votes.

As seen above, when we include the actual percentages of Yes and No votes, the clear distinction between the coasts and the heartland blur significantly.

Still, in both these maps above, there is a very important group of voters that are not taken into account: Those who never went to the ballot box in order to boycott the referendum.

Even though the ballot itself had only two options, we had three separate political campaigns across the country: The Yes Campaign by the ruling AKP, The No Campaign by the opposition parties CHP and MHP, and the Boycott Campaign by the Kurdish party, BDP.

So, here is another map for you below. This one shows the preference of the majority votes in each province. Blues=Yes, Reds=No, and Yellows= Boycott.

I know, this last map makes things even more complicated... The cities in the southeast which seem to be the most pro-Yes, hence pro-AKP above, suddenly turn out to be the most pro-boycott, hence more pro-Kurdish provinces below!

With these three maps, I just wanted to lay out the most recent puzzle in Turkish politics.

If there could be so much variation in just displaying the results, imagine how much variation could exist in interpreting them.

Good luck in your efforts to make sense of the referendum results. Let me know if develop something more sophisticated than this "a nation split in two/three ways" argument...

Hope you're enjoying the cool days of fall without a sore throat or runny nose,

The referendum averse Academic Mommy