Ballot Completion in Türkiye’s Concurrent Presidential and Parliamentary Elections: A Comparison of 2018 and 2023

Abstract

This article examines parliamentary ballot drop-off in Türkiye’s concurrent presidential and parliamentary elections of 24 June 2018 and 14 May 2023. Drop-off is defined as the non-negative province-level shortfall in parliamentary ballots submitted relative to presidential ballots submitted, measured across all 81 provinces from official Supreme Election Council statistics. Treating presidential ballot submission as a same-day benchmark isolates an aggregate within-election dimension of ballot-count correspondence that conventional turnout measures do not reveal. Direct comparisons of the 2018 and 2023 provincial distributions are combined with OLS models of 2023 drop-off conditional on its 2018 level and pre-period political geography, and with analyses of the untruncated signed ballot-count gap. Mean benchmark drop-off fell from 0.0231% of registered voters in 2018 to 0.0046% in 2023, dispersion and upper-tail values contracted substantially, and the signed gap shifted from a predominantly positive pattern toward one closely centered on zero. Alliance-partner exposure in 2018 is associated with lower drop-off in 2023, and the association survives signed-gap, party-decomposition, leave-one-out and permutation checks, while earthquake-affected provinces display somewhat higher conditional drop-off. Change-score models, however, show no larger reductions where alliance partners were stronger. These province-level associations should not be read as causal or individual-level effects.