Residential segregation by educational status in Turkey, 2013: Examining the association with political preferences

Abstract

No research has examined the association between political preferences and residential segregation by educational status. In Turkey, affective polarisation is very high and warrants an examination of whether political preferences are associated with educational residential segregation. This study uses data on Turkey from the 2013 Address‐Population Based Registry, the 2011 Census of Population and Housing and voting archives maintained by the Supreme Election Council to examine residential segregation by educational status across the nation's 81 provinces. We find that the segregation between groups at the ends of the educational distribution is the highest. Those with college education are segregated at a moderate level from those with no schooling and a primary‐school education. High‐school graduates are moderately segregated from those with no schooling. Multivariate analyses reveal that political preferences are significantly associated with educational segregation. The implications of this spatial distancing are discussed for Turkey and other politically polarised societies.

Residential Segregation by Education in the U.S., 2016–2020

“…Similar to the U.S., those who voted more liberally tended to be more educated, and areas with greater shares of votes cast towards the outgroup wanted to live among each other, thereby raising educational residential segregation. Across Turkish provinces, the percentage voting for the conservative political party, the party that has been in power, was negatively associated with educational residential segregation [15]. We expect similar findings for the U.S. -the percentage of votes for Clinton in the 2016 election will be positively associated with more educational segregation from 2016 to 2020; the percentage of votes for Trump in the 2016 election will be negatively associated with educational segregation from 2016 to 2020.…”

“…If political preferences are related to educational attainment, this begs the question of whether political preferences in the aggregate could be associated with educational segregation. This was found to be the case in Turkey, which is even more politically polarized than the U.S. [15,30]. Across Turkish provinces, the percentage voting for the liberal political party, which is the political out-group in the society, was positively associated with greater levels of educational segregation across all measures of educational residential segregation [15].…”

“…This was found to be the case in Turkey, which is even more politically polarized than the U.S. [15,30]. Across Turkish provinces, the percentage voting for the liberal political party, which is the political out-group in the society, was positively associated with greater levels of educational segregation across all measures of educational residential segregation [15]. Similar to the U.S., those who voted more liberally tended to be more educated, and areas with greater shares of votes cast towards the outgroup wanted to live among each other, thereby raising educational residential segregation.…”

“…Second, much of the research on socioeconomic segregation is largely descriptive in nature [4][5][6][7][8]14]. An increasing body of literature systematically examines variation in socioeconomic segregation across cities or other geographic areas through empirical analyses [2,3,9,10,12,[15][16][17].…”

“…Third, little attention has been paid to the association between political preferences and socioeconomic residential segregation, and particularly residential segregation by educational status [15]. In the U.S., the significant growth in animosity between political parties as well as the geographic separation between people of different political parties necessitates an examination of the association between political preferences and educational segregation [18][19][20][21][22][23].…”