Sunday, October 7, 2012: 12:15 PM
Some studies in the literature argue that corruption usually makes little difference in the fortunes of politicians. Voters react dramatically only when the corruption is massive, the information on it is highly-credible and well-publicized, involves all parties across the board, not accompanied by otherwise competent and beneficial governance, and a non-corrupt alternative is available. The political aftermath of the two earthquakes which struck northwestern Turkey in 1999 provides some supporting evidence in that regard. These quakes not only caused enormous amounts of death and destruction, they also exposed rampant corruption involving construction and zoning code violations. The government’s relief efforts were tainted by corruption as well, and exhibited a great deal of incompetence. How voters responded to these in the next parliamentary election held in 2002 is investigated, estimating party vote equations through application of robust regression methods to cross-provincial data. The fact that different group of parties were responsible for the construction of the shoddy buildings, and for the corruption and mismanagement related to relief, provided us with a unique opportunity to determine whether and how the electorate punished the culprits for each of these. Our results show that voters punished all of the parties which ruled during the previous decade and not just the incumbents at the time of the earthquakes. The party in charge of the ministry responsible for disaster relief, and parties that controlled the past city administrations in the quake zone were blamed more. The newly formed Justice and Development Party (AKP) was the main beneficiary of the votes lost by these parties. Our results shed light also on the emergence of a new party system in Turkey after 2002.
Keywords: Turkey; Natural disaster; Disaster aid; Corruption; Election; Voter behavior
JEL Classifications: D72, D73, H84