Turkey

Büyük Millet Meclisi

Background

Turkey’s unicameral Büyük Millet Meclisi (Grand National Assembly), also known as the Meclis (Assembly or Parliament), is an assembly of 550 members.

Seats are allocated in proportion to population among 85 electoral divisions which are based on the boundaries of the 81 Turkish administrative provinces (with Istanbul administrative province being divided into 3 electoral divisions and Ankara and Izmir provinces into 2 divisions each).

The numbers of seats allocated to the electoral divisions range from small divisions with 1-2 seats up to the large Istanbul divisions with 27-30 seats each.

Members are not directly elected, but seats are allocated within each division by the closed party list system of seat allocation(using the D’Hondt method), but only to parties which achieve a threshold of 10% of the total vote nationwide.

The use of a high nationwide threshold works against the electability of parties which are small or regionally concentrated, and in recent elections only two or three major parties have been allocated seats in the Meclisi under thus system.

Small parties may form alliances and register for the elections as one official party.

Independent candidates (including nominees of small parties) can nominate in an electoral division and can be allocated a seat if they win sufficient votes, without regard to the 10% national threshold. In 2007 a total of 35 such ‘independents’ were elected, all of whom represented a cluster of small parties led by the significant Kurdish regional party.

Terms are up to four years.

Elections

Overview

Having been proportionally allocated, inequality in the effective influence of voters caused by variations in Meclis division enrolments is low; the standard deviation of variations compared to the mean enrolment being xxx% in November 2015.

[nomination openness – party configurations]

[summary of results]

Inequality in the effective influence of voters caused by variations in division turnouts (formal votes) is low; the standard deviation of variations compared to the mean formal vote being xxx% in November 2015.

[inequality by margins]

Specific elections

2011 – 2015 (June) – 2015 (December)

Data

Sources

[data source – data completeness – anomalous contests]

Dataset

[Datasets are not yet published]

• Turkey election results – 2011-15