Building consensus: shifting strategies in the territorial targeting of Turkey's public transport investment

© 2019, © 2019 Regional Studies Association. A growing amount of research explores how the allocation of regional development monies follows electoral reasons. Yet, the existing literature on distributive politics provides different and contrasting expectations on which geographical areas will be targeted. The paper focuses on proportional representation (PR) systems. While in such settings governments have incentives to target core districts and punish foes, it is suggested that when incumbents attempt to build a state–party image they may broaden the territorial allocation of benefits and even target opposition out-groups. The paper exploits data on Turkey's public transport investment for the period 2003–14 and in-depth interviews to provide results in support of the hypothesis.Harvard Emirates Leadership Initiative Fellowshi

Distributive politics and regional development: assessing the territorial distribution of Turkey’s public investment

Turkey is often perceived as a country with low bureaucratic capacity and prone to political manipulation and ‘pork-barrel’. This article tests whether this is the case, by analysing the extent to which politics, rather than equity and efficiency criteria, have determined the geographical allocation of public investment across the 81 provinces of Turkey between 2005 and 2012. The results show that although the Turkish government has indeed channelled public expenditures to reward its core constituencies, socioeconomic factors remained the most relevant predictors of investment. Moreover, in contrast to official regional development policy principles, we uncover the concentration of public investment in areas with comparatively higher levels of development. We interpret this as the state bureaucracy’s intentional strategy of focussing on efficiency by concentrating resources on ‘the better off among the most in need’