Master Thesis Defense: Emine Arı
Elections And Human Rights Violations During Civil Conflict: The Case Of Turkey
Emine Arı
Political Science, MA Thesis, 2015
Thesis Jury
Arzu Kıbrıs (Thesis Supervisor), Emre Hatipoğlu ,Reşat Bayer, Hasret Dikici Bilgin(Substitute Jury)
Date &Time: July,30th 2015 – 10:30
Place: FASS 2034
Abstract
This thesis aims to address the question, “What is the impact of human rights violations during a civil conflict on election results?” During civil conflict, the combatant sides –either state or insurgent group- seek to gather support and paralyze the rival by cutting the human and logistic support of local people by resorting to violence. These actions of the combatants are resulted with serious human rights violations. This thesis is an attempt to estimate political outcomes of civilian victimization by the state and PKK. Two types of, indiscriminate and selective, victimization are examined separately. During the analysis we use multivariate tobit regression to assess the impact of the state and PKK civilian victimization on the government party/parties’, left and right wing parties’, and pro-Kurdish (HADEP) and ultra-nationalist (MHP) parties’ vote share. Our results suggest that indiscriminate victimization by the state increases voter’s approval rate for the government parties; while the PKK victimization decreases the government parties’ vote share in the following elections. Turkish voters, who are exposed to state indiscriminate victimization, vote for the left wing parties those are more concessionist to insurgency in order to build peace. People are less eager to punish PKK than state in response to their losses since indiscriminate victimization by both state and PKK increases the vote share of HADEP.