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Ruohan Zhang
Introduction to Comparative Politics
Written Assignment: Institutional Change and Social Outcomes
May 11, 2016
Crossing the Threshold: A Case Study of Electoral Reform in Turkey
For any Turkish political party to gain seats in the National Assembly, it
must win more than 10% of total national votes cast in an election. While a
number of countries that use proportional representation have electoral
thresholds for parties seeking office, Turkeys electoral threshold of 10% is
the highest in the world. Because of this high threshold, smaller parties,
often representing Kurdish and other minority interests, have been
repeatedly disadvantaged, seeing their votes essentially wasted in elections
where they fail to pass the threshold. As such, I propose that lowering the
electoral threshold to 5% will result in increased representation for smaller
and regional parties that often encompass minority group interests in Turkey.
Turkeys 10% threshold is a product of its long secular tradition and two
destabilizing military coups. For the first two decades after the Turkish
Republics founding, Mustafa Kemal Ataturks Republican Peoples Party
(CHP) dominated Turkish politics, creating a republic largely based on its
founders commitment to secularism. After the first non-CHP president was
elected in 1950, Turkey entered into its multi-party phase of history,
highlighted by two short-lived but destabilizing military coups in 1960 and

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1980. As a result, the 10 percent threshold came into effect in 1983 as
Article 33 of the Law on Election of Members of the National Assembly, as
part of the transition back to civilian rule 1. At the time, political elites
attributed the military coups to the natural aftermath of several failed
coalition governments, the Assemblys inability to elect a president, and
extensive political instability. Article 33 outlined clear rules for the threshold:
parties that failed to surpass 10 percent of the national vote share would be
excluded from seat allocation in parliament and their votes would be
discarded. Independent candidates unaffiliated with any party were the only
exceptions and can win seats based on their performance in a district,
disregarding the 10 percent threshold. Overall, the framers of the electoral
threshold believed that it would encourage strategic voting and push voters
to larger, centrist parties and result in fewer unstable coalition governments.
In recent years, researchers have argued that in addition to this mechanical
reason, an additional impetus for the high threshold was to keep Islamist
parties out of parliament, pursuant to CHPs secular origins. For example, the
Islam-based National Salvation Party, whose vote share fell just under 10% in
both 1973 and 1977, failed to pass the 10% threshold to enter parliament in
the 1983 election 2.
While the threshold was initially successful in preventing fragile
coalition governments, in the long run it failed to yield the intended effect in
keeping out religious parties. In the elections of 1983 and 1987, the
1 Bipartisan Policy Center. Turkish Baraj: The Parliamentary Threshold and the
Constitutional Court. BipartisanPolicy.org. December, 2014. 3-4.
2 Ibid.

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threshold contributed to producing majority, single-party governments. By
the 1990s, however, Turkey began to see unstable, short-lived coalition
governments again, as well as the feared rise of Islamist parties. In 1996,
Necmettin Erbakan, leader of the Islamic Welfare Party (RP) became Prime
Minister of Turkey. RP morphed into the Islamist Justice and Development
Party (AKP), whose leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has ruled Turkey with
increasing authoritarianism since 2002.
Since 2002, the high electoral threshold has contributed to flawed
proportionality in Turkeys list PR system, resulting in the repeated exclusion
of smaller parties. In 2002, for example, AKP won 34.3% of the vote but 66%
of seats in the Assembly, while the conservative True Path Party won 9.6% of
the vote but no seats in the Assembly due to the threshold 3. Because Turkey
uses the DHont method to allocate seats, votes discarded due to the
threshold benefit parties that have large vote shares but not necessarily an
electoral majority. As such, CHP was only other party that received seats in
the Assembly that year. Overall, parties representing 46.3% of all votes in
the 2002 election were effectively excluded from the Assembly, resulting in
significant lack of representation for voters 4. Ten years later, in 2011, 27
parties participated in national elections, but only three parties and a handful
of independents won seats. By excluding smaller parties from PR, the
threshold has contributed in recent years to the AKPs dominance as a singleparty majority and increasing authoritarianism.
3 Terry, Chris. Crossing the Threshold the Turkish Election. Electoral Reform Society. June
11, 2015.
4 Ibid.

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Furthermore, the threshold has specifically resulted in the exclusion of
regional and pro-Kurdish political parties from government, despite the
Kurdish minority making up about 18% of the Turkish population 5. Prior to
the Free Democratic Partys (HDP) efforts June 2015 election, no Kurdish
party had ever contested and won national elections because of the
threshold. Instead, to circumvent the threshold, pro-Kurdish parties had to
run their candidates as independents, which allowed 36 members of the proKurdish Peace and Democracy Party (a precursor to the HDP) to win
Assembly seats in 2011, but made it difficult to organize policy and
supporters nationally as a unified political party, or become part of governing
coalitions 6. This difficulty was exacerbated by the fact that various proKurdish parties have been continuously outlawed throughout history for
being allegedly affiliated with the terrorist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK),
effectively forcing them to reorganize every few years. The continuous
exclusion of peaceful pro-Kurdish from government has contributed to
increasing discontent from the large Kurdish minority, the stalling of the
Kurdish peace process, and increasing violence from the PKK.
For ordinary citizens, lowering the electoral threshold to 5% (or even
eliminating it altogether) would result in more proportional representation in
the National Assembly and a reduction in strategic voting for parties that do
not necessarily best represent their views. Under formal thresholds, the
disproportionality of an electoral system is always increased because
5 The World Factbook. Middle East: Turkey. CIA.gov. May 5, 2016.
6 Yackley, Ayla Jean. Kurdish party could upset political landscape in Turkey. Reuters. June
3, 2015.

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votes for parties that might otherwise have won representation are wasted
7

. Because a formal threshold as high as 10% further exacerbates this theory,

lowering the threshold will decrease the disproportionality and reduce the
number of wasted votes for smaller parties. Over the past decade, for
example, because of the crosscutting cleavage of religion and ethnicity,
Kurdish voters who are devout Muslims generally voted for AKP, rather than
a pro-Kurdish party that better represents their interests, as evident from
demographic information in polls. In addition, a large proportion of AKP
voters come from the Nationalist Outlook Movement (NOM), a movement
further right from where the AKP stands now, but did not win enough votes
to pass the threshold. These voters would likely change their votes if the
threshold was lowered and their preferred parties could enter the Assembly.
As voters alter their votes in response to greater choice among parties
and closer representation, vote shares for parties will subsequently change,
thus altering incentives for political elites. According to Duvergers
hypothesis, a proportional electoral system is more likely to foster multiparty
systems 8. As such, lowering the electoral threshold acts as a means of
increasing proportionality, which would result in a higher effective number of
parties in the legislature, more consistent with the social cleavages present
in Turkish society. For existing political parties, this would necessitate a
reassessment of their electoral bases and create greater incentive to appeal
7 Clark, William Roberts, Matt Golder, and Sona Nadenichek Golder. Principles of
Comparative Politics. Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2009. 573.

8 Clark, 653.

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to their fringe voters who may be swayed by another party. The AKP would
have to work harder to appeal to its disparate constituency, such as Kurdish
and far-right voters mentioned previously. Smaller parties like the Kurdish
HDP and the National Movement Party (MHP), a far-right party currently with
seats in the Assembly, and regional parties would have greater incentive to
organize nationally and prevent even smaller parties from competing for
their voters support. Currently, the MHP has competition from the Great
Unity Party (BPP), an even more nationalist far-right party, and the HDP has
competition from other regional Kurdish parties. A lowered threshold would
give the BPP and smaller Kurdish parties a chance to cut into the HDP and
MHPs respective vote shares, forcing them to appeal more strategically to
voters as parties. Similarly, independents would no longer have an
advantage over small parties candidates in not being subject to a threshold,
so they would have to run with a party or work harder to either distinguish
themselves.
Nevertheless, the effect of a lowered electoral threshold may be
diminished by the DHondt method used in Turkey for seat allocation because
of hidden thresholds, as well as the AKPs potential success in transforming
Turkey into a presidential democracy before any electoral reform takes place.
In contrast to quota systems (e.g. Droop or Hare) where seats are allocated
by order of vote share, the DHondt method is slightly less proportional and
weighted in favor of the parties that do the best, not just the top scorer.
While the more proportional systems can still splinter the field and give

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minority parties more power, the DHondt method still acts as a safeguard in
favor of larger parties in the Turkish system. As such, a slight bias in favor of
larger parties would still exist even without the threshold. Secondly, although
AKP and other Turkish parties have proposed electoral reforms that involve
lowering the threshold, AKP (namely, Erdogan) has proposed changes in the
Turkish constitution to make the political system more presidential, which
would detract from any gains in power for opposition parties in the Assembly
that occur as a result of a decreased threshold.
A possible concern of lowering the electoral threshold is that small extremist
parties that do not represent Turkish society in general would have
disproportionate power, which is also the reason the threshold was originally
implemented. While this is possible in theory, it is unlikely in practice, as the
AKP and the CHP would likely still gain a large proportion of vote shares due
to their wide-ranging constituencies and cross-regional popularity. Moreover,
history has shown that the 10% threshold was ineffective at keeping out socalled extremist parties, as the AKP was originally viewed as a fringe Islamist
party that threatened Turkeys secular tradition. If anything, a lowered
threshold and a larger role for opposition parties in the Assembly would
serve as deterrence against the authoritarianism of large parties like the AKP.
Ultimately, the only way to address the problem of staggering electoral
thresholds detracting from voters representation is to lower them. While
Erdogan and the AKP have proposed electoral reforms, they are avoiding the
problem of poor representation, as these reforms would essentially lower the

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threshold but bring Turkey closer to a majoritarian system, which would
further bolster large parties like the AKP and CHP to the detriment of smaller
parties. Preserving the current proportional system, while lowering the
threshold to 5%, would bring Turkey closer to the majority of parliamentary
democracies in Europe that have this same threshold. Nevertheless, the
practical possibility of electoral reform in Turkey remains unlikely, as Erdogan
hopes to secure a two-thirds majority in the Assembly to transform Turkey
into a presidential system, an increasingly probable prospect after Minister
Davotglus resignation later this month.
Word Count: 1878

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Bibliography
Bipartisan Policy Center. Turkish Baraj: The Parliamentary Threshold and the
Constitutional Court. BipartisanPolicy.org. December, 2014. 3-4.
Clark, William Roberts, Matt Golder, and Sona Nadenichek Golder. Principles
of Comparative Politics. Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2009. 573.
Terry, Chris. Crossing the Threshold the Turkish Election. Electoral Reform
Society. June 11, 2015.
World Factbook. Middle East: Turkey. CIA.gov. May 5, 2016.
Yackley, Ayla Jean. Kurdish party could upset political landscape in Turkey.
Reuters. June 3, 2015.