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ABSTRACT
When outside actors criticize domestic rights and freedoms, do voters take notice? We argue that messages coming from outsiders who condition resources on democracy, and who have expertise in democracy promotion, are more likely to change minds. We also argue that partisanship is a moderating variable when it comes to the impact of outside messages: partisan elites help amplify or lessen the impact of outside messages. We offer evidence from a series of survey-experiments we deployed in Turkey, focusing on the roles of the European Union and of the European Court of Human Rights as sources criticism of domestic freedoms. We show that emphasizing expertise and conditional benefits can cause more belief updating. We also show that pro-government voters are likely to change their minds but that opposition supporters may do so as well. Non-partisan voters show some evidence of backlash, possibly because they are disengaged and alienated from elites. The argument has implications for the ability of outside actors to influence domestic-level processes related to democracy in countries in imperfect democracies and in countries sliding towards authoritarianism.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. For example, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights is an autonomous judicial institution based in Costa Rica.
2. Winning an election inspires confidence in electoral institutions among former ‘losers’ (Hall et al., Citation2015). Cantu and Garcia-Ponce (Citation2015) confirm the partisan loser’s effect on opinions about electoral integrity.
3. MENA countries will probably not join the EU but the EU does offer some rewards for improved democratic freedoms and so our argument applies in principle.
4. Many people were put on trial over the alleged criminal network Ergenekon, said to be plotting a coup against the government.
6. See the 2011 Turkey Progress Report by European Commission and the response from Egemen Bagis, Turkish Minister of EU Affairs and Chief Negotiator, regarding concerns about media freedom in the report.
7. ‘EU will give Turkey 4.4 billion Euros in financial support’ 26 September 2014, Haber 7 (Ekonomi).
8. Turkey’s 2015 fact-sheet gives a sense of the infractions the ECHR has investigated with respect to Turkey, with a summary of most notable cases and some statistics. The document indicates that, of the 87 cases that were decided, in 79 cases the court found at least one violation of the European convention on human rights. See http://www.echr.coe.int/Documents/CP_Turkey_ENG.pdf.
9. Category in Court reports: right to liberty and security.
10. The sampling procedure adopted in the post-election round of the TES-2011 and TES-2015 starts with the use of Turkish Statistical Institute’s (TUIK) NUT-1 regions. The target sample was distributed according to each region’s share of urban and rural population in accordance with the Address Based Population Registration System (ADNKS) records.The study was conducted by Frekans Research between 26 November 2015 and 10 January 2016. See www.infakto.com.tr and www.frekans.com.tr.
11. Another reason for the focus is statistical power: different outcome questions mean we can ask all respondents both questions (without awkwardness). Given that we expect the effects to be small, this seemed like a warranted strategy.
12. Gender: 1 = male, 2 = female; Education: 0 = no formal education, 8 = college graduate; Religion: 1 = not religious at all, 4 = very religious; Left-Right: 0 = leftmost, 10 = rightmost.
13. We have also performed non-parametric tests and OLS regression with interactive terms for partisanship by experimental arm, controlling for age, education, sex, religiosity, with comparable results.