Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Turkish Studies (Elektronik), cilt.13, sa.14, ss.33-49, 2018 (Hakemli Dergi)
In last decades, the phenomenon of equal ethnic representation –electoral engineering – emerged as an important political strategy toprevent ethnic violence and to ensure societal stability in ethnic studiesliterature. To provide ethnic group representation, different kinds ofelectoral quotas have been adapted to electoral laws in about 30countries. Though Turkey is not among these countries, Turkish electoralsystem – proportional representation – enables ethnic representationthrough non ethnic parties while limiting the representation throughethnic parties via the general threshold practice of 10 per cent.Suprisingly, in 2015 general elections; 10 per cent threshold inelectoral law served as mechanism for increasing share of votes ofPeoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) – Kurdish Ethnic Party –, and that partyattained the record number of chairs in the Turkish assembly. It wasexpected that more than two years lasting negotiations on Kurdish issuewould be implemented easier than before because of the HDP electoralsuccess, but on the contrary of the literature, cease fire was finalized justafter the elections.In this article, it is aimed to explain that equal ethnicrepresentation do not always have the anticipated effects as argued inelectoral engineering methods. A faction of ethnic movement may againturn to violence in order to implement its own agenda in case of a lack ofconsensus between subgroups.