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Research

  • Catastrophes, Social Ties and Voting Behavior: Evidence from Turkey +

    How and through which channels does indirect exposure to a catastrophe affect voting behavior? I analyze the effect of indirect exposure to the earthquake and the government response on voting outcomes, focusing on the aftermath of the earthquake in Southeastern Turkey on the 6th of February, 2023. The election of interest is the 2023 Turkish general election, considered one of the most crucial elections in the modern history of Turkey. For identification, I use the share of people from the earthquake-affected (EA) area in a non-EA county. Backed by causal evidence, this proxy is predictive in the post-earthquake migration choices of the directly affected individuals. Using the share of individuals from the EA area as treatment intensity, I employ a difference-in-differences design and compare voting outcomes before and after the earthquake across counties with differing shares of people from the disaster area. I find that the higher share of people from the EA area leads to a decrease in the vote share of the opposition block and the CHP (Republican People's Party or Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi), the main opposition party. On the contrary, the effect for the AKP (Justice and Development Party or Adalet ve Kalkınmma Partisi), the main incumbent party, is positive and larger. There is no effect on the incumbent block's vote share. The effect is driven by counties with a higher share of individuals from the provinces that voted relatively less for the incumbent block and the AKP in the 2018 general election. +