Electoral Preferences of Turkey's Elusive Alevi Population | Ali Çarkoğlu

Sectarian identity is among the main determinants of vote choice. In the case of Turkey, the Anatolian Shi'a minority group of the Alevis has distinct partisan preferences, typically for left-leaning opposition. A major difficulty is that due to sectarian conflicts, Alevis hide their identity, which creates a challenge for survey researchers to diagnose who is an Alevi. I use a novel approach to determine Alevi's identity, examine their voting patterns, and compare these patterns with those of the majority group, the Sunni Turks. Alevis have distinct attitudinal character and policy preferences, supporting the left-leaning main opposition significantly.

Ali Çarkoğlu is currently a professor of political science at Koc University-Istanbul. He received his Ph.D. at the State University of New York-Binghamton in 1994. He previously taught at Boğaziçi and Sabancı universities in Istanbul. He was a resident fellow in 2008-2009 at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS). He has held visiting positions at the Center for Political Studies of the University of Michigan (2017-2018), Institute for Social Research and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law of the Freeman Spogli Institute of Stanford University (2024-2025). His areas of research interest include voting behavior, elections, public opinion and party politics in Turkey. He is the founding director of the Center for Survey Research (https://csr.ku.edu.tr/home) and the Center for Civil Society and Philanthropy Research (https://kusitham.ku.edu.tr/). He is on the editorial board of Turkish Studies, South European Society and Politics and Insight Turkey. His most recent book co-authored with Ersin Kalaycıoğlu appeared from the University of Michigan Press: Fragile but Resilient? Turkish Electoral Dynamics, 2002-2015 (2021). Both authors co-edited Elections and public opinion in Turkey: Through the prism of the 2018 elections (2021), Routledge.