The Shaping of Party Preferences in Turkey: Coping with the Post-Cold War Era

An overview of general elections and the party system from the beginning of multi-party politics in Turkey would indicate a proclivity towards an increasing number of major parties coupled with fragmentation of the party system. The predominant party system of the 1950s favored stability over representativeness (see Table 1). The 1961 Constitution established new electoral rules and a liberal political regime, which provided for more opportunity for representativeness. The 1965 and 1969 elections produced party governments, with a proportional representation formula that wasted almost no votes; even those parties with the smallest number of followers won some seats in the Turkish Grand National Assembly (TGNA) (see Table 1). For a while in the 1960s Turkey therefore appeared to have discovered the optimal ground of converging stable governments with consummate representativeness. The party governments of the 1960s, however, gave way to the unstable coalition governments of the 1970s, which coincided with a wave of terror and political instability. Coalition governments came to be equated with political instability and terror in the minds of not only the masses, but also the most powerful political forces in the country.