SNAP ELECTIONS

BALLOTS have been cast every year over the last five years or so. This is an election-laden political economy. There were lots of referenda, local or general elections, election re-runs, etc. over the last 13 years. Whether it is opportune to call citizens to the ballot box at a time when the pandemic isn’t over yet, and its economic consequences, piled on top of existing economic woes, endure is a question mark. Yet nobody can say for sure there won’t be snap elections. Actually, there was talk about early elections even in the last couple of months of 2019, before C•VID -19. It can happen. Whether it will happen is another matter. Why is that so? What may the electoral outcome be? Is there a rationale in all this? In any case, we had better approach the electoral conundrum-to-be from a politico-economic equilibrium standpoint, as if elections were oligopolistic games if only because according to a strain of thought votes are political prices.

Why elections all the time? This can in itself be a sign of fundamental instability. In the canonical normative analysis of political competition, full convergence of party platforms is regarded as Pareto optimal. This extends to probabilistic voting as well. In the mainstream neoclassical world of Hotelling-Nash-Downs, probabilistic voting can be the result of uncertainty surrounding the preferences of the celebrated median voter (MV ). We have two conflicting results in the analytical politics literature. When preferences of voters are stable but the identity of the MV is unknown – perhaps because the turnout is uncertain - voters will rationally prefer convergence of party platforms. Nevertheless, when voters’ preferences are subject to shocks that are unobserved by political parties, voters will prefer to choose among diverging party lines. In other words, a multi-party system where political parties advocate similar policies, all centered on the legendary MV’s preferences, could indeed be optimal, but voters should have stable political preferences undisturbed by any shock. •therwise, voters themselves prefer to face diverging party platforms since such diversity allows them to correct policy proposals that are based on a wrong perception of their preferences.

If the political center moves in a way that renders the political process non-stationary, optimality will ultimately require at least two genuinely different parties that would act as attractors. Strategies like “we are all at the center” or “we are all alike” would not suffice to span stable equilibria. Unless we assume that the political center doesn’t shift we should admit the necessity of a second mass party able to face the incumbent party reasonably successfully as a serious rival in electoral competition. This party’s line should be sufficiently different – not necessarily in contradiction with - from the incumbent line. We are talking about an electoral competitor, not about an otherwise con

strued pole of political influence. Because there is an optimal degree of polarization in every political system based on electoral competition, perfect sameness of political party lines isn’t conducive to equilibrium. The question is: can the CHP play this role in such a culturally and ideologically heterogeneous polity? Are CHP votes truly on the rise? Even if the answer is yes, wouldn’t a stronger center-right party serve to stabilize the system as well?

ELECTORAL GAMES

Notwithstanding the quality of its leadership, CHP is not the insignificant thing-in-itself, as many journalists have tried to portray. The CHP still has bite. It may or may not surpass 30 percent but it shows signs of vitality and might get out of the 25 percent box. This much is obvious even though it has failed remarkably clearly in almost every election after 2004. But this ‘bite’ is rather limited. It is unclear at this stage whether a more liberal and less status quo oriented CHP could have appealed to larger masses. It is equally unclear whether a more leftwing CHP could put electoral stocks in the faith of a renewed Enlightenment. More to the point, the CHP is becoming a de facto substitute for political non-existence. In the absence of a well-defined political center-left, supported by trade unions, what the CHP can become is perhaps what it did become already. However, the fact that many observers are at pains to understand the words and deeds of the CHP need not score negatively in the polls. The incongruence and vagueness this party brings, deliberately or not, to its discourse may have helped it from further electoral debacles. Could not it be the case that people do not vote for the CHP for what it is, but for what it is not, cannot be and will never become? For once the CHP makes a choice and goes in either the left direction or heads towards the more liberal (old) center (which might not exist today), it may no longer represent and incarnate the political absence it has purportedly been filling in the last so many elections. Redefining what Left means is a world-historical task that no center-left party can undertake today, anywhere. The CHP has no historical referents and no sufficient political and intellectual endowments to embark on such a task. Given this, it should perhaps be best left to wander.

Moreover, from the looks of where this party gets most of its electoral support, it can in no stretch of imagination pass for a leftwing party proper, even in the most postmodern of all possible worlds. As such, we will possibly see a slightly better performing CHP in the coming elections, but the slowly rising star of the party would owe nothing of its ascending trajectory to either a renaissance of left-wing feelings of some sort or to any substantive opposition breakouts. As hollow as ever, this party’s ideological line has not contributed to its electoral performance, and any possible relative success will have definitely nothing to do with a well-designed, centrally-implemented political discourse. It has to do with manners mostly, as Imamoglu has proven, and as Yavas has been underwriting lately. Therein lies the key to electoral success. Also it depends on who is to blame in the face of rising unemployment, poverty and all that. It seems like the key lies with the economy more than ever.

FINALE

Economic voting is a general concept that relates electoral support for the incumbents to economic performance built upon the assumption that voters would hold the government responsible for economic events. Now, outcomes may be analyzed both at the individual and at the aggregate level. At the individual level, socio-tropic and ego-tropic (pocketbook) approaches are the main two approaches and so are the prospective and retrospective voting hypotheses, assuming economic voting. I believe that the political agenda is two-dimensional in this country, the economic and the cultural/religious/nationalistic dimensions, and that economic voting is at least partially present. Consider retrospective ego-tropic voting behavior: voters behave according to their assessment of past economic facts concerning their own welfare. If voting behavior is prospective, voters behave according to their expectations of how their paycheck will be affected in the next electoral term. If they behave sociotropically, they assess the macroeconomic or aggregate economic conditions and believe that if such conditions are fine, their welfare will increase. This doesn’t imply altruism: this only means that voters’ self-regarding preferences are such that they find it in their best interests to vote in favor of the party that can improve the environment. This may be so out of a sense of security, or out of the belief that without macro stability even if their individual paychecks increase, this will be a short-lived result.

Now, what is the evidence? I think many an academic electoral study still gives support to the conjecture that economic voting is the best theory we have. •rdinarily, with strict economic voting, snap elections would make sense for the incumbent party if only the outlook is even dimmer. A related idea is that it all depends on the likelihood that the two new parties can simultaneously flourish as time passes by and AKP voters may switch to them to some extent. There is also a third argument. Because votes are political prices it may be time to revalue the extant political capital at those new postC•VID 19 prices. The way I see it, odds are even at this stage.