From anxious moderns to anxious conservatives

One other outcome of the April 16 referendum is that in big cities voting patterns differed between city centers and its peripheries. Looking at Istanbul, I especially focused on four districts where the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) is strong; all of these four municipalities are run by the AK Party. 

Two of them, Üsküdar and Bayrampaşa, are at the city center; they do not receive immigration and the population is stable. The other two are Sultangazi and Sultanbeyli, where immigration is ongoing and they can to a certain extent be regarded as slums sociologically. 

The method here is to add the votes of the AK Party to the votes the opposition Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) received in these four districts in the Nov.1, 2015 general elections, and compare how this potential translated into "Yes" votes one and a half years after in the constitutional referendum. 

Sultanbeyli, on the Asian side of Istanbul, has a potential vote figure of 131,000, which is the AK Party plus the MHP votes. In this district, the "Yes" votes were 1,500 short of this figure. In this constituency, the number of voters increased by about 7,000. 

From these numbers, we can conclude that the alliance succeeded; at least AK Party voters converted their choices to "Yes" votes without receiving any serious loss. The deviation of the potential on Nov. 1 converting into "Yes" votes on April 16 is around 1.1 percent. 

The outcome in Sultangazi, on the European side of the city, is slightly different. The voting potential of the alliance of 198,000 votes came out 10,000 votes less, as around 188,000 "Yes" votes. The number of new voters in this district is more than 7,000. In Sultangazi, the loss of votes of the alliance when compared...