Analyze Voter Behavior in Turkish Elections with Python

This is a continuation of a blog I have written earlier called Create Turkish Voter Profile Database With Web Scraping .

Background

In that blog, we had mentioned that CHP (Republican People's Party) had surprised people by overcoming AKP (Justice and Development Party) in March 31 2024 Local Elections for the first time in 22 years. 2 major explanations for CHP's victory are:

• Turkish retiree population are tired of AKP's bad economic management. So they have voted significantly this time for CHP.
• CHP is popular among youth. As more and more young voters are eligible to vote, CHP can only increase its popularity.

Are these true though? Let's find out.

Data

In the previous article, we have collected data from Turkish Statistical Institiute, and managed to make a dataset of 2018 Parliament Elections at disctrict level.

For each district, we have collected # registered voters per age group, and the # votes collected by all political parties including AKP and CHP. This is how the data looks like:

Columns named between 18-24 and 75+ show the # registered voters within each bucket while akp_vote and chp_vote shows the # votes these 2 parties gained in 2018 parliament elections.

Correlation Analysis

We can do a simple correlation check between each age bucket and # votes per party:

As you can see above clearly, AKP vote counts correlate better with youth (lower age groups) while CHP vote counts correlate better with elderly (higher age groups).

One thing to note though, this data is from 2018 elections, so the trends may have changed since then, however, we can safely say that in 2018, the youth did not necessarily favor CHP compared to AKP. It should be interesting to do this with the data from latest 2024 elections.

Demographic Analysis

Moreover, I think that retiree population in Turkey get unproportional attention. Below chart shows the # registered voters per age group across the country:

As you can see above, there were only 6.9 million registered voters above the age of 65 in 2018.

Compare this with 56.3 million total number of registered voters! Retirees make up only 12.3% of the population in Turkey. Even if CHP can get all their support, it would still fall behind AKP.

Contrast the retiree age bucket with voters between the ages of 18 and 24. This age group alone contains more than 8 million people, more than all the retiree population. Political parties that are succesful at addressing youth problems have a higher chance of winning the elections.

Recommendations

While the analysis we did above is super simple, and it is based on outdated data (2018), we can see that youth support for CHP may not be taken for granted. There was a time in history (2018) where districtis with large youth population voted in favor of AKP.

Additionally, retirees make up only 12.3% of the population. For a political party to become the ruling party in Turkey, it should win the hearts of young & working class of the country.

Turkey is still a very young country, so policies towards younger (45-) age groups will determine the fate of the political parties.

Resources

Find the code & data here in this GitHub repository.

Happy hacking!