A research regarding the factors affecting behavior of Malatya province voters

The most effective and common way for individuals to influence the political system is to vote in elections that ensure the well-functioning of democracy. This activity that is conceptualized as voter behavior ensures that the people's will is powerful on the political administration while fulfilling crucial tasks in terms of the political structure and political parties. For this reason, understanding voter behavior has become an essential field of interest in terms of political science. This study aimed to investigate the factors affecting the voting preferences of the voters living in Malatya. Voter behavior deals with in the literature mainly within the framework of socio-cultural and economic factors. Voter behavior can be determined by the influence of many factors such as voters of gender, education level, age, profession, as well as ideologies, mass media, political leader, and party program. In this study, in the first part of our study, the basic concepts that make voter behavior understandable have been tried to be explained. Likewise, in the first chapter, theories that approach voter behavior from a scientific perspective and the factors that affect voter behavior are explained. The second part of our study includes the statistical analysis of the democratic general elections in Malatya with the transition to multiparty political life in Turkey and, in particular, and the evaluation of the factors affecting the behavior of Malatya voters in these elections. In the third and last part of our study, we analyzed with SPSS that the data obtained from the field study carried out with 530 participants in the central districts of Malatya and presented the results. Our research includes the survey questions applied in the field study and the data obtained from these questions. According to the findings, we concluded that the two most important factors affecting the voters' voting behavior are the ideology and the economic indicators of the country.