Voting power in democratic societies and the effect of voting power on public debt: The case of Turkey

103 pages Political parties act in the direction of their interests and their voter?s preferencies in democratic societies. Voting power being held by political parties is so important in terms of decisions taken and the political-economic effects of these decisions. In general, voting power is percevied as number of seats of political parties in parliaments. However, voting power of a voter or block does not only depend on the number of seats, but it also depends on quota, electoral system, coalitons that will be constituted and the effect of coaliton formation. For this reason, some mesurement techniques are devoloped in order to measure voting power correctly. The differences between measurement techniques are caused to emerge a large number of indexes. One of the purposes of this study is to explain these indexes and main concepts of voting power literature and to bring innovation to Turkish literature. The other main purposes are to determine the voting power of ruling party, coalitions and main opposition party in the Grand National Assembly of Turkey (GNAT), by looking diary represantative activation after 1987 and to constitute time series with these values for econometric analysis. In this calculation, we utilized Normalized Banzhaf Index (NBI) used commonly in literature and simple majority rule. The final main purpose of this study is to test for the influence of voting power among the political parties of GNAT on total public debt over the period of 1987.1-2009.12. This relation between voting power and total public debt has been analysed with Least Squares Method (OLS). According to OLS results, voting power of ruling party and coalitions in GNAT, has positive effect on public debt but it is statistically insignificant. Conversely, the main opposition parties have negative impact on public debt. This index is also statistically insignificant.Key Words: Voting Power, Simple Voting, Winning Coalitions, Weighted Voting, Voting Power Indexes, Quota, I-Power, P-Power.