Continuity and change in Turkish politics: economic and behavioural explanations of democratic backsliding

ABSTRACT

This paper introduces a special issue focusing on the intricacies of Turkey’s party system and the evolution of Turkish party competition amid democratic challenges. The introduction provides a brief overview of each paper in this special issue, which delves into the relationship between economic factors and voter behavior, offering insights into the continued dominance of the ruling party. While doing so, the special issue specifically examines the 2023 Turkish General elections, presenting alternative perspectives on how the incumbent party maintains its electoral success.

KEYWORDS:

• Turkish Politics
• democratic backsliding
• elections
• electoral behaviour
• party politics

Turkey has been experiencing radical shifts in its regime characteristics. Especially after the 2017 presidential referendum and the consequent elections in 2018, Turkey is now considered an archetype of democratic backsliding in addition to countries such as Thailand, Mali, Hungary, Serbia, and India. Over the last decade, there has been extant literature about this topic.

Earlier, Öktem (2010) focused on the relationship between the party and voter groups to show that the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi – AKP) was the only party able to articulate changing societal demands at that time. Thus, the AKP successfully won the support of a broad cross-section of society by aggregating their demands in a way acceptable to a wide range of voters. Furthermore, Somer (2019) highlighted affective and ideological polarization to explain Turkey’s declining institutional quality and political decay, while Esen and Gumuscu (2021) provided an account based on political economy and various interest groups that align themselves with AKP’s hegemonic domination over elections.

Other explanations have focused on the incumbent’s increasing control over the judicial processes (Özbudun 2015) and disproportionality and malapportionment in the electoral system, which creates an unlevelled playing field (Çarkoğlu and Aksen 2019). Alternatively, the strategic use of populism to garner and keep electoral support groups (Selçuk 2016; Aytaç et al. 2021) is proposed as a specific social process that may be associated with backsliding. Additionally, the role of media capture by the incumbent dominant party (Yıldırım et al. 2021) and highly partisan evaluations of critical policy issues, such as a transition to the presidential system (Aytaç et al. 2017; Laebens and Öztürk 2021) are other relevant factors proposed for the Turkish case.

While these institutional and social accounts focus on different facets of democratic backsliding, norms of electoral representation and democratic functions adopt a highly majoritarian understanding (Schedler 2013; Levitsky and Way 2010). At the same time, electoral politics still play a vital role in countries like Brazil, Turkey, Hungary, Poland, and India, and free and fair elections are the last institutional norm to change. This majoritarian understanding may necessitate support for change, especially among the incumbent voters.

In this context, this special issue aims to understand the micro-level dynamics of democratic backsliding in Turkey and the decline in electoral competitiveness. Previous research usually aimed to present alternative causes of backsliding in Turkey. In this special issue, we aim to complement such work by focusing on the 2023 elections and present different papers that aim to understand the dynamics of elections in the context of backsliding. Not many studies on the competitiveness of the Turkish party system seek to explain hegemonic party survival and the micro-level dynamics of backsliding. This special issue, thus, aims to fill such gaps stemming from the lack of micro-level empirical and theoretical studies by untangling different support patterns among voter groups and contribute to the fledgling literature by focusing on how voters understand and evaluate various regime types, electoral competitiveness, and economic functions of the government and material/non-material expectations from it.

To assess the Turkish case’s recent political changes and continuities, we focus on several interrelated topics: political economy, party system, (lack of) democratic competition, and voting behaviour. We do this to provide a broad and coherent perspective on the recent developments in Turkey and to understand the economic and behavioural reasons behind Turkey’s backsliding process with an eye to the 2023 elections. While doing so, we start with several contributions to the special issue that broadly depicts the electoral contestation in the 2023 elections, followed by behavioural and economic aspects of Turkish party competition.

The first paper in the special issue by Kocapınar and Kalaycıoğlu compares results from the 2018 and 2023 elections. It presents a general overview of behavioural correlates of party choice in the Turkish context. While doing so, they underline the role of political socialization, changes in the party system, clientelistic ties, and threat perceptions as potential sources of influence for party identification. In line with previous research on polarization, they indicate that partisan and cultural divisions remain prominent in Turkish electoral politics.

The second paper by Yardımcı-Geyikçi and Yavuzyılmaz focuses on elite discourse and the role of negative attack politics in the 2023 elections. While presenting the details of the campaign period, they also show how the dynamics of backsliding have influenced the populist and divisive discourse of the political elite during the 2023 elections. Within competitive authoritarianism, alternative campaign strategies by leading presidential candidates highlight the dynamics of positive and negative narratives and voter perceptions.

Ayan-Musil’s paper focuses on electoral competition over the tenure of the ruling Justice and Development Party since 2002 to show that the incumbent party actively aimed to create an uneven competition pattern. To do so, Ayan-Musil shows how the incumbent party strategically adopted alternative institutional designs by eliminating or co-opting viable alternatives. Therefore, by the 2023 elections, the competitiveness levels were already subpar in the Turkish context as the incumbent started to change the design after losing popular support in 2015.

The fourth paper by Elçi focuses on the ideological underpinnings of right-wing political parties in the Turkish context. Tracing the role of populism as a ‘thin ideology’ across historical cases of right-wing parties in Turkey, Elçi shows the role of the incumbent party’s populism in the 2023 elections and during the more protracted process of backsliding. The paper also details how the vilification of alternative political movements and parties and the depiction of alternatives as the ‘enemy’ rather than viable options occur in the Turkish context.

Baruh and Çarkoğlu focus on the candidate nomination process in the 2023 elections. Since 2018, due to the shift to a presidential system, presidential candidate nomination has become an integral part of the political competition in Turkey, and 2023 could potentially be a critical turning point in the consolidation of political power under one incumbent party as the opposition had a considerable chance of forcing a turnover. However, the nomination procedure shows critical divisions and fragmentation within the opposition alliance, which could be another reason for the continuing dominance of Turkish politics under a single party.

The sixth paper by Yıldırım is about the appeal of potential ideological linkages in the 2023 elections. It evaluates the extent to which ideology plays a role in Turkish political competition and shows the enduring significance of ideology in the face of economic challenges. The substantive content of ideological division shows that it relates to cultural differences and non-economic issues more than the economy, leading to stark divisions across Turkish society along ideological differences. These differences continued to play a prominent role in the 2023 elections, reducing the number of potential party choice alternatives for voters.

The seventh paper by Aytaç approaches the 2023 elections from a lens of economic voting. During the campaign period and before the elections, the Turkish economy faced severe challenges due to inflationary pressures. One crucial question is the extent to which such challenges were relevant to understanding (lack of) support for the incumbent AKP in elections. Aytaç’s findings show that despite the economic downturn, AKP supporters’ evaluations have changed little since the last elections. Therefore, regardless of economic changes, economic voting remained relevant in 2023, as perceptions about the economy did not change substantively.

The paper by Kutlay and Öniş also approaches the topics from a political economy perspective. It uses a prominent framework by Hirschmann (Exit, Voice, and Loyalty) to explain Turkey’s current trajectory and 2023 elections. Despite what the authors call multiple governance crises -including economic downturns- the ruling party could hold onto power as loyalty to the incumbent continued to generate essential incentives for voter groups despite these governance crises. Furthermore, the authors approach the topic with this analytical perspective by introducing domestic and international factors and indicating potential trajectories for similar cases that experience backsliding, such as Turkey.

The ninth paper by Özel continues with the role of political economy and focuses on two crucial economic institutions as a comparative case study. Presenting detailed fieldwork evidence, Özel shows the extent to which institutional capture and change occurred during backsliding in the Central Bank and the Turkish Competition Authority. Evidence suggests that the incumbent party used various tools and tactics to co-opt supposedly independent institutions to regulate economic policymaking. Therefore, Özel’s paper presents an overall framework of institutional change during periods of backsliding, establishing the context in which the 2023 elections also occurred.

Finally, the tenth paper of the special issue by Ayhan, Aydın, and Ulcay approaches the economy from another angle, focusing on recent episodes of financialization and accumulating household debt. They show that increasing levels of household debt are associated with voting for the incumbent and stability. However, rising debt levels also lead to dire social consequences before and during the 2023 campaign. This paper presents a crucial social implication of the economic policy that led to AKP’s growth-based orientation, which abruptly ended in the economic downturn before the 2023 elections.

All in all, these ten studies about the 2023 elections focus on behavioural and economic explanations to evaluate the dynamics of Turkish democratic backsliding, and taken together, they present a comprehensive analytical framework.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mustafa Aydin

Mustafa Aydın, Professor of International Relations, Kadir Has University, Istanbul, Turkey.

Kerem Yıldırım

Kerem Yıldırım, Assistant Professor, Political Science and Publict Adminiastrationi Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey.