The Grand National Assembly of Turkey Between 1995 and 2018: Changing profile of the opposition MPs

The primary goal of the project is to collect and analyze biographical data about the members of the Turkish parliament from the 20th term of the parliament onwards to better understand the relationship between biographical characteristics (social, economic, and cultural backgrounds) and the MPs' duration of service and positions in the parliament. The project, inspired by a previous PURE project and ongoing research of the PI (Principal Investigator) both of which focused on 1920-1950, now expands into a more contemporary period. The project will be conducted in collaboration with Muzaffer Hakan Tok (TS-MA candidate, FASS) and that aspect of the project will primarily focus on the Republican People’s Party (the RPP; CHP in Turkish) in the aforementioned period. 
 
The secondary goal of the project is to analyze whether, and in what ways, the profile of the MPs in the different Turkish political parties have converged in terms of the biographical profile of their representatives (such as educational background, place of birth, bureaucratic career backgrounds, known languages, etc.). In other words, the project also seeks to see if the profile of the MPs of the opposition parties, in this case the RPP, transformed in a manner that resembles the ruling party as a result of deliberate policies that aim to be attractive to a larger pool of the electorate for success in the elections.
 
The project consists of three phases: data collection, data visualization, and analysis. The first phase will be based on collecting and compiling data from the existing and accessible literature of the biographical studies about the members of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey between 1995-2018. The second phase will be based on visualizing the data with the help of digital humanities tools. Finally, the third phase will be based on the analysis of the same data with digital humanities methods (such as Associated Rule Mining and others) with the contributions of scholars from fields of Political Science and Computer Science.