Seat-vote elasticity and the provincial distribution of government spending in Turkey

Çağrı Levent Uslu ()
Additional contact information
Çağrı Levent Uslu: Yeditepe University

Eurasian Economic Review, 2017, vol. 7, issue 1, No 3, 49-67

Abstract: Abstract The main question to be explored in this paper is, whether results of parliamentary elections have an impact on the provincial per-capita government spending. A firmly related question to which the literature has sought an answer and which also assists the effort to answer the question at the center of this study is how a government, interested in maximizing its electoral support, allocates government spending across administrative units (i.e. provinces for Turkey, states for the US). A possible answer to be given to this question relies in the seat-vote elasticities in provinces. The term stands for a coefficient that shows the relation between changes in percentage of seats in response to changes in the percentages of votes. It has been argued that electoral systems, with predominantly majoritarian characteristics, tend to display higher levels of seat-vote elasticity whereas systems mainly revealing proportional traits are characterized by lower levels of seat-vote elasticity. Turkish parliamentary electoral system is proportional election. Yet, levels of seat-vote elasticities may still be a determinant in the allocation of government spending across provinces in Turkey. With regards to the relation between seat-vote elasticity and per capita government spending, it is a widely held belief that the administrative units with a high level of seat-vote elasticity should benefit more from government spending, and those with low level of seat-vote elasticity should benefit less. The paper begins with the calculation of the seat-vote elasticities for 67 provinces for the six general elections held between 1990 and 2013. Then these seat-vote elasticity figures are used as explanatory variables in a fixed effects regression in which the dependent variable is the shares of per capita government spending across provinces. Results will be compared with the findings of the literature that conclude as highly elastic seat-vote relation demands more per capita government spending.

Keywords: Seat-vote elasticity; Loyalty; Government spending (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E60 E62 H10 H54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s40822-016-0056-7 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:eurase:v:7:y:2017:i:1:d:10.1007_s40822-016-0056-7

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/40822

DOI: 10.1007/s40822-016-0056-7

Access Statistics for this article

Eurasian Economic Review is currently edited by Dorothea Schäfer

More articles in Eurasian Economic Review from Springer, Eurasia Business and Economics Society Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().