The Geography of Gulenism in Turkey

Source:Foreign Policy Date:23Mar2019

To see how deep the Gulen movement’s influence really was, we looked at publicly available data on the Erdogan government’s purge to map and measure the extent of Hizmet’s reach across Turkey’s over 900 districts. While the full accuracy of each individual affiliation on these lists can’t be tested, what matters for our main statistical analysis is the cross-regional variation in the influence, not the absolute numbers. We also used data scraped from official government websites on local public investments in education, health, and religious infrastructure, as well as data on non-Gulenist business associations and religious endowments, and information from the Turkish census and elections.