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Southeast Europe
April 21, 2017 www.intellinews.com I Page 12
Academic claims “Never- AKP” vote disappeared in Turkey’s referendum
bne IntelliNews
A group of voters who demonstrate hard-core opposition to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and have never voted for his Justice and Development Party (AKP) in any election seemed to disappear when it came to the historic April 16 referendum that handed the president expanded powers.
Swedish assistant professor at the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics (SITE), Erik Mey- ersson, released a blog post on April 18 entitled “The Curious Case of the Vanishing Never-AKPers in Southeastern Turkey”, with his preliminary look at voting patterns in last weekend’s poll. What he discovered is a group of voters that have always voted against Erdogan and the AKP, creating a “fat tail” in the distribution of votes – something which was entirely missing from the poll result.
“At a first glance, when plotting the vote share distribution of the YES vote at the ballot box level [is the fact] that the 'Never-AKPers' were gone. These Never-AKPers are voting groups that have extremely few or literally zero votes for the AKP. In past elections, they have been quite noteworthy. The [chart] illustrates this by plotting the distri- bution of the AKP vote shares for the 2011, June 2015, and November 2015 parliamentary elections and in the bottommost graph the YES vote share in Sunday’s referendum,” Meyersson wrote in the blog post.
“Essentially, the fat left tail (ie. the ballot boxes with next to zero AKP votes), which stands out in the previous three elections, is almost entirely
A ballot paper and envelope used in the referendum. 'Evet' translates to Yes while 'Hayır' translates to No.
gone in 2017. What happened? Did the areas where the AKP was the least popular suddenly have a change of heart?” Meyersson concluded.
As bne IntelliNews reported at the time, Meyers- son previously produced a detailed statistical