How rationally did the voter behave?

After a period of intense propaganda, we have left one more election behind us. As in all elections, this time too the parties tried to persuade voters to vote for their parties with particularly rational justifications. It is not possible to think that the propaganda conducted in the campaign appealed only to reason. Indeed, propaganda is, more often than not, an activity that appeals to emotions rather than reason. That is why one may not need to be very rational in order to persuade people of something. Perhaps developing clever arguments or discourses is important, but one need not think that these discourses always appeal to reason.

Indeed, in many campaigns it can be much easier, and just as effective, to “frighten” people about the other side, to develop warranted or unwarranted anxieties about the other side, to set in motion ethnic, religious, linguistic or class “sympathies” or “antipathies” toward the other side. Discourses of sympathy or antipathy can easily turn into discourses that produce hatred or cults. To what extent the element of identity (the distinction between “us” and “them”), which politics inevitably contains in every case, is decisive in elections has always been a matter of curiosity.

Undoubtedly, the assumption that the voter gives more weight to certain emotional reasons than to behaving rationally, and moreover that, even if those carrying out propaganda appeal more to emotions, beneath it all the voter is entirely rational and can be persuaded when rational justifications are presented, forms the axis of propaganda.

In his column on Friday, Yaşar Süngü conveyed notes from Prof. Dr. Yılmaz Esmer’s research on “Voter Behaviour in Turkey: The Myth of the Rational Voter,” which Esmer shared at Bahçeşehir University with a group of media members and students, and the findings of Esmer’s latest research, frankly, showed that voters’ choices are predominantly emotionLEFT or emotionRIGHT (duyguSOL or duyguSAĞ).

According to Esmer’s findings, “there is no voter who acts using his reason. Neither economic crisis nor war nor financial aid is decisive in voting. What is fundamental all over the world is loyalty and trust in the party and leader.

Voter psychology in choosing the party to vote for is the same in every country of the developed and undeveloped world. After we determine in our minds the party we will vote for, we close our sense organs and refuse to be informed. People are closed to things they do not like.

In street surveys, citizens are asked which party they vote for and why. Because he cannot say he votes because he likes the height, moustache, looks and oratory of the party’s representative, he lists whatever comes to mind from economic and social policies. That is, he is not telling the truth.”

These findings are results that more or less everyone who studies voter behaviour can accept. The preferences of the Southeast voter in particular, which in his vote choice appear not at all proportionate to the services he has received or the economic or social benefits he can reach, show very well that there must be some more emotional channels for being included in that bloc.

The non-rational weight in voter behaviour is a clear fact. However, one point needs attention in this emphasis on rationality. The emphasis that the voter is not rational is generally a theme beloved of those who think that “the voter does not know what he is doing and needs enlightenment or tutelage.” The sound recordings that have emerged of former Chief of General Staff İsmail Hakkı Karadayı or of all the Ergenekon detainees work this theme very well. Moreover, this is not only the problem of the Ergenekonists. The voter’s non-rationality is generally a label attached to the voter when he does not act in the desired direction,

Whereas the voter’s non-rationality shows precisely a very important nature of politics. Contrary to what the Ergenekonists or those who can derive a duty from these data suppose, it has nothing to do with ignorance or with the voter not knowing what he is doing. In his behaviour the voter takes into account many factors that seem surprising, disappointing or incomprehensible to the analysts who make assessments about him, and does not always look only to his own personal benefit. This does not diminish the value of his vote; on the contrary, it is an important sign of his demand in politics that must certainly be taken into account.

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Birol Akgün of Selçuk University, for instance, in his speech at the Konya BİLKAD, after laying out the dimension of rationality in the voter’s behaviour, also lays out a mode of behaviour that is hard to understand. “The voter,” says Akgün, “though not very generous or exaggerated in rewarding the successful politician, is very merciless in punishing the unsuccessful politician. That is why we have a country in which, from election to election, there are very massive shifts between parties, in which a party that gets 25 percent in one election can drop to 1 percent in the election three years later.”

The fact that the AK Party has regularly increased its votes in all the elections it has entered up to now already makes it special in Turkish political life. Although the election results were not clear enough at the hours when this article was written, they show that it has been unable to continue this trend.

It appears that the AK Party has suffered a serious loss of votes because of candidate choices that bypassed local democratic processes in some places in particular. News comes that in many places voters did not go to the ballot box en bloc to send a message to the AK Party.

Whatever the results, it is clear that they will open the doors to a strong self-criticism regarding what follows in political life. In any case, may the results be auspicious for our country