Democratic Backsliding, Conflict, and Partisan Mobilisation of Ethnic Groups: Local Government Control and Electoral Participation in Turkey

ABSTRACT

Partisan mobilisation is critical for constituencies with low premobilisation participation, even in countries like Turkey with generally high levels of electoral turnout. We argue that parties appealing to ethnic minority constituencies benefit disproportionately from the symbolic and material resources that local government control provides. Central government’s exceptional decisions to intervene can, however, curtail access to these resources and affect electoral politics. Focusing on three Turkish elections and a referendum in 2015–2018, the article analyses how the political context of democratic backsliding and conflict affected the pro-Kurdish party’s control of municipalities, their mobilisation capacity, and hence turnout. Specifically, the previously higher rate of turnout in pro-Kurdish party-controlled municipalities compared to other municipalities disappeared following the elected mayors’ replacement by appointed trustees.

KEYWORDS:

• Electoral turnout
• identity group
• pro-Kurdish party
• appointed trustees
• post-civil war peace
• sub-national government
• terrorism
• central government intervention

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Saliha Taspinar and Merve Edeer for their research assistance and 2021 APSA Conference participants, Serkant Adiguzel, and the Editors and anonymous reviewers of South European Society and Politics for their comments.

Disclosure statement

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

Supplementary material

Supplementary data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/13608746.2023.2255017

Notes

1. Mardin Metropolitan municipality’s mayor was formally an independent candidate, but he is actually a long-standing member of the pro-Kurdish party.

2. A similar result of high turnout was observed for poor voters in Russia (Saikonen 2017) even though poor voters in general tend to vote less.

3. Martinez i Coma and Morgenbesser (2020) counterintuitively find a negative association between clientelism and turnout in authoritarian elections.

4. The Inquiry Commission reports 125,678 public official dismissals (Karakaş 2022).

5. For purposes of comparison, we mark here the same 18 provinces analysed by Tezcür (2015) as Kurdish-populated provinces. In other work (Arı, Bayer & Kemahlıoğlu forthcoming; Arı et al. 2022), we use alternative coding decisions. We present the alternatives in the online appendix (Figure A1 and Table A1).

6. Turkey is administratively divided into 81 provinces (il) and 922 districts (ilçe). Thirty of these provinces have second tier metropolitan municipalities that were created to meet the needs of large urban areas such as Istanbul. The rest of the provinces have their own province municipalities (ruling their centre (merkez) districts). Each district (in provinces with or without metropolitan municipality) has its own municipality. The municipalities are governed by a directly elected mayor and a municipal council. In addition to these elected political positions at the local government, the central government appoints governors (vali) at the province and district-governor (kaymakam) at the district level.

7. Since the emergency decree law introduced this change as an amendment to the municipal legislation (Belediye Kanunu, no. 5393), it remained in effect even after the lifting of the state of emergency in July 2018 and the practice continued after the 2019 local elections. In these elections, even the basic principles of representation were violated when in six municipalities, the position of mayor was given to the AKP candidates who came second in the elections. The argument was that the winners were dismissed from their previous positions through an emergency decree law. Their candidacies, however, had already been approved prior to the elections by the YSK.

8. In most district municipal councils, the mayor’s party controls the majority of the council seats due to the electoral system that gives additional quota seats to the mayor’s party. This is not the case for the more well-known metropolitan municipal councils where the members are indirectly elected.

9. Only five districts did not have their mayor imprisoned or detained. In five cases, mayors were detained, but not imprisoned. One mayor escaped from detention. We could not find information on the co-mayors in one district. Sources are available from the authors upon request.

10. See Steele & Schubiger 2018; Sánchez & Del Mar Palau 2006 for other examples.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Reşat Bayer

Reşat Bayer is Associate Professor of International Relations at Koç University. His primary research interests are international cooperation and conflict, political violence, and peace within and between countries. His research has appeared in the British Journal of Political Science, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Peace Research, and South European Politics and Society, among other journals.

Özge Kemahlıoğlu

Özge Kemahlıoğlu is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Sabancı University. Her research focuses on party politics, sub-national governments, distributive politics, and incumbency advantage. Her articles have appeared in Comparative Politics, Journal of Politics, Journal of Theoretical Politics, Latin American Politics and Society, South European Politics and Society, and Public Choice among others. She is the author of Agents or Bosses? Patronage and Intra-party Politics in Argentina and Turkey (ECPR Press, 2012).