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Understanding the dynamics of vote-buying is essential to improve accountability of elections in developing democracies. While list experiments are useful for attenuating social desirability bias associated with measuring vote-buying, they are not conducive to multivariate analyses, and the question of what types of individuals are targeted is left inadequately explored. We overcome this limitation by combining a population-based list experiment with an estimator (LISTIT) that allows for multivariate analyses in an efficient manner. Our analysis suggests that in the 2011 parliamentary elections of Turkey over one-third of the electorate was targeted for vote-buying, which is more than double the proportion willing to admit when asked directly. Additionally, we find that strong partisans of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), less-educated individuals, and urban residents are significantly more likely to be targeted for vote-buying. We present compelling evidence for the hypotheses that parties target their core supporters and socio-economically vulnerable individuals. The strength of our evidence derives from the use of original data on vote-buying that has been collected in an unobtrusive manner and analyzed at the level of individuals. WORD COUNT: 86671 This is because the probability of misrepresentation of true behavior might not be orthogonal to important covariates such as income, education, or partisanship (Gallego and Wantchekon 2012).

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The aim of this article is to examine press-party parallelism during the 2011 national elections in Turkey. The article reports findings from a content analysis of 9,127 news articles and editorial columns from fifteen newspapers regarding the trajectory of press-party parallelism over the course of the twelve-week national elections campaign period. We focus on two indicators of press-party parallelism: (1) respective “voice” given to the two leading parties, calculated as the ratio of news that quoted sources from the incumbent Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP) to the leading opposition party Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi (CHP) and (2) news articles’ tones toward AKP and CHP. The newspapers that were content analyzed were first categorized into three groups based on survey data regarding the voting intentions of their readers: (1) a group of “conservative” newspapers whose readers intended to vote primarily for AKP, (2) a group of “mainstream broadsheets,” and (3) a group of “opposition” newspapers with a readership base intending to vote for CHP. The findings suggest that over the course of the election campaign, internal pluralism in both conservative and opposition papers declined in terms of voice given to respective parties and tone of news coverage.

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How does a dramatic shift in political context that renders security concerns the most salient electoral issue influences voting? To address this question, we take advantage of the peculiar timing of elections and heightened terror attacks in Turkey with the use of original panel data. The June 2015 Turkish general election resulted in a hung parliament, and a snap election was held in November. While the period before June was relatively calm, the inter-election period witnessed an upsurge of terror attacks and casualties. A three-wave panel enables us to track how voters’ electoral preferences changed over this period. Our analyses suggest that the terror attacks led voters to prioritize parties’ perceived competence in addressing security concerns at the ballot box. The abrupt change in issue salience has bolstered support for the incumbent Justice and Development Party which was evaluated by voters as more competent than other parties.

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