Religiosity, Public Sector Employment, and Horizontal Inequalities in Turkey

In this study, we examine the impact of group favoritism on the labor market in Turkey. In societies that are horizontally fragmented between identity-based social groups, electoral competition is often motivated by the desire to use public office to advance group interests. By exploiting individual-level polling data that spans the available 2012-2018 period in pooled cross-sectional fashion, we analyze whether age cohorts that joined the labor market before and after the religiously conservative AKP came to power experience varying outcomes in public employment depending on their religion and religiosity. We find that under AKP rule pious Sunnis displayed significant improvement in terms of their share in public sector employment. Our findings are likely to be driven by the end of the headscarf ban in public employment and AKP government’s use public employment and resources to reward like-minded groups. We conclude that public employment is an important tool for influencing horizontal inequalities