Political Polarisation on Social Media: Competing Understandings of Democracy in Turkey

ABSTRACT

Heightened political polarisation threatens democratic stability. While prior studies find polarisation in competing groups’ deployment of different terminologies to describe the same topic, we emphasise that it can also be evident in groups’ attachment of different meanings to the same terminology. Competition for dominance in the public sphere is reflected in social media which become sites of contestation, showcasing antagonistic claims of legitimacy. In a case-study of the June 2019 rerun Istanbul elections in Turkey, we used qualitative and computational methods to analyse approximately 116,000 tweets, focusing on discussions around the themes of ‘democracy’, ‘elections’, and ‘public service’. Twitter users associated the act of casting a vote not only with electing the candidate, but also with a competition over the future of Turkish democracy.

KEYWORDS:

• Turkish politics
• elections
• 2019 Istanbul elections
• political discourse
• Twitter
• computational text analysis
• hashtag analysis
• public service

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Neal Caren for kindly sharing his data and Matti Nelimarka for helping us get access to Twitter data. We are grateful to Akın Ünver who organised the Summer Institute in Computational Social Science in Istanbul in 2019. The groundwork for this article started as a group project there, we feel very lucky to have met such amazing people that summer. We also would like to thank Susannah Verney for her guidance and patience throughout the review process.

Disclosure statement

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

Declaration of equal authorship

The first two authors are equally first authors of this article.

Supplementary material

Supplementary data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/13608746.2023.2200901.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Didem Türkoğlu

Didem Türkoğlu (PhD, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) is an assistant professor at Kadir Has University. Her research focuses on political sociology, social movements, social media, and studies of social inequalities. Her articles have appeared in the Journal of Democracy, Mobilisation, Sociology Compass, Current Sociology, and Research in Political Sociology, among others.

Meltem Odabaş

Meltem Odabaş (PhD, University of Arizona) is an independent academic researcher. Her research investigates the role of interaction and communication networks in decision-making and behaviour in social settings including markets, online communication, and social movements. Her work has appeared in Social Currents, Forum for Social Economics, and American Behavioral Scientist among other venues.

Doruk Tunaoglu

Doruk Tunaoglu has recently finished his master’s studies in the department of psychology at Boğaziçi University. He works on computational methods and cognitive systems. His research focuses on cognitive features of collective and vicarious memories. He particularly focuses on the similarities and differences between memories of indirectly and directly experienced events.

Mustafa Yavaş

Mustafa Yavaş (PhD, Yale University) is a postdoctoral research associate in the Division of Social Science at New York University Abu Dhabi. His research centres on economic and political sociology with strong interests in work and occupations, globalisation, social movements, and social networks. His work has appeared in Social Science Computer Review, Journal of Mathematical Sociology, and Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change.