Voter Trends in the Marmara Region, Who Did Our Neighbors Vote For?
At the meeting titled “Voting Trends in the Marmara Region, Who Did Our Neighbors Vote for?” to be organized by Kadir Has University Istanbul Studies Center on Thursday, November 9th between 10:30-12:00, a new website that provides the opportunity to conduct real-time, comprehensive and detailed inquiries into the voting trends that have taken shape throughout the Marmara Region in the May 14, 2023 parliamentary elections will be introduced. The potential contribution of this site, developed with the support of the Heinrich Böll Stiftung Association, to electoral geography studies, the field of political anthropology and local government studies will be discussed.
The study titled “Voter Trends in the Marmara Region, Who Did Our Neighbors Vote For?” is a New Generation Digital Election Atlas that aims to make the results of the May 14, 2023 parliamentary general elections questionable and evaluable by all citizens.
In Turkey, election results are generally evaluated through political messages and numerical distributions. However, the political arena is directly related to resource allocation and ideologies as well as spatial distributions and interactions. Methodological difficulties have delayed the comprehensive and detailed evaluation of election results obtained at the ballot box and neighborhood levels in Turkey. For this reason, high-resolution electoral geography studies in Turkey are extremely inadequate. The inadequacies of the electoral geography field prevent the monitoring and evaluation of social, demographic and economic differentiation behind local political preference profiles. Conventional electoral maps are inadequate in terms of level of detail and resolution. The dasymetric map method used in the study provides opportunities to compile and evaluate information based on settlement spots within administrative units, rather than providing information based on administrative unit boundaries. To the best of our knowledge, this approach and web portal, which have never been used before in Turkey,
• Evaluating the local performance of political parties, interpreting election results together with social, economic and demographic data, • Providing valid data support for the election work and policy-making processes of political parties before the 2024 local elections, • Facilitating the election security work of political parties, NGOs (e.g. Vote and Beyond) and citizens, will be able to make significant contributions.
At the meeting, Istanbul Studies Center Director Prof. Dr. Murat Güvenç will introduce (i) the characteristics of the dataset used in the study, (ii) the problems of diagnosing and representing local political preference patterns, (iii) the visualization process of the findings, (iv) the creation of a high-resolution, interactive web portal, (v) the process of point, local and areal querying in the web environment in the light of current political debates.
Follow the Istanbul Studies Center: