Is Erdo?an warmongering for political power?

I am not a fan of conspiracy theories at all. In fact, even the London pub Grenadier?s famous Bloody Marys were not enough to convince me of some of the more plausible conspiracies during my last trip to the city. However, I am also a numbers-guy and some data I recently stumbled upon are forcing me to believe the unbelievable.

Istanbul firm S Informatics Consulting has been compiling their Fovea Oberaza index of political stability and risk for nearly two decades. Modeled after the World Bank?s well-known governance indicators, the index is made up of data in nine sub-categories: Basic legitimacy and decisiveness of governance norms, parliament support and structure, the functioning and current formation of the government, efficiency and governance, relations with institutions, relations with foreign political actors, bureaucratic capacity and usage, political violence and economic factors.

Anyone even faintly familiar with recent developments in Turkey would not be surprised that the index is at an all-time low. But what really intrigued me was a simple graph of two of the sub-indices in Turkish news and infographic website manset.at by my good friend (and fellow Be?ikta? fan), Tar?k Y?lmaz. Efficiency and governance, which is, according to S Informatics founder and CEO Serdar Sement, a proxy for support for the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), seemed to be increasing in response to the rising political violence.

Appearances can be deceiving and so I dusted off my statistics software and calculated standard and rolling correlations, confirming that the two sets are indeed moving together. However, correlation does not mean causation, so I ran some statistical tests to check for causality as well. Lo and behold, my...