Abstract:

Economic voting is the concept that economic conditions affect election outcomes. Traditional research on the indicators of voting behavior commonly utilizes indicators such as GDP/capita, inflation, rate of income tax, export volume, provincial urbanization rate, unemployment rate and industrial growth rate. These macro measures may remain inadequate in fully incorporating the contemporary dynamics of today’s global economic environment: competition, change and innovation, local differences.  Therefore, this study is a first attempt to analyze the voting behavior not at country but at city level including competitiveness dimensions. Competitiveness level at each city is measured via four indicators.  Human capital and life quality; branding potential and innovativeness; trade and production potential; accessibility.  Based on these four indicators, a city competitiveness index is developed by the International Competitiveness Research  Council of Turkey . The index is based on publicly available city level data and it is updated annually. There are few studies on municipal elections that pose local economic activity as the source of economic voting but to our knowledge there is no study exploiting city level economic data as the determinants of economic voting in national elections.