S. Erdem Aytaç

Distributive Politics in a Multiparty System: The Conditional Cash Transfer Program in Turkey

What are the dynamics of distributive politics in a setting of multiparty competition? Existing studies on the allocation of resources across multiple electoral districts focus primarily on a setting of two-party competition and consider only the core versus swing district hypotheses. This framework does not correspond to the actual electoral setting in many countries and ignores valuable information furnished by a context of multiparty competition. Compared with two-party elections, multiparty elections provide more information about the underlying distribution of the ideological preferences of voters in a district; this information could be utilized by the incumbent party to maximize electoral returns. In this article, I argue that a setting of multiparty competition presents incentives to the incumbent party to channel disproportionately more resources to districts with an ideologically close challenger. Systematic evidence from the Conditional Cash Transfer program spending in 878 districts of Turkey from 2005 to 2008 supports this hypothesis.

Who gets targeted for vote-buying? Evidence from an augmented list experiment in Turkey

Understanding the dynamics of vote-buying is essential for improving accountability in elections in developing democracies. While list experiments are useful for attenuating social desirability bias associated with measuring vote-buying, they are not conducive to multivariate analyses, and the question of what types of individuals are targeted is left inadequately explored. We overcome this limitation by combining a population-based list experiment with an estimator (LISTIT) that allows for multivariate analyses in an efficient manner. Our analysis suggests that in the 2011 parliamentary elections in Turkey over one-third of the electorate was targeted for vote-buying, which is more than double the proportion willing to admit when asked directly. Additionally, we find that strong partisans of the ruling Justice and Development Party ( Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi ), less-educated individuals, and urban residents are significantly more likely to be targeted for vote-buying. We present compelling evidence for the hypotheses that parties target their core supporters and socio-economically vulnerable individuals. The strength of our evidence derives from the use of original data on vote-buying that has been collected in an unobtrusive manner and analyzed at the level of individuals.

Why Some Countries are Immune from the Resource Curse: The Role of Economic Norms

The political resource curse – the detrimental effect of natural resource dependence on democracy – is a well-established correlate of authoritarianism. A long-standing puzzle, however, is why some countries seem to be immune from it. We address this issue systematically by distinguishing two kinds of economies: contract-intensive, where individuals normally obtain their incomes in the marketplace; and clientelist, where individuals normally obtain their incomes in groups that compete over state rents. We theorize that the institutionalized patronage opportunities in clientelist economies are an important precondition for the resource curse, and that nations with contract-intensive economies are immune from it. Analysis of 150 countries from 1973 to 2000 yields robust support for this view. By introducing clientelist economy as a prerequisite for the resource curse, this study offers an important advance in understanding how nations democratize.

Taking Sides: Determinants of Support for a Presidential System in Turkey*

Abstract A key issue on the Turkish political agenda concerns a transition to presidentialism, with a constitutional amendment proposal submitted in December 2016. While the positions of political elites are well known, we lack a detailed analysis of the electorate’s views on such a transition. To fill this gap, we present cross-sectional and panel data collected over the period from spring 2015 to winter 2015–16. Partisanship emerges as the key factor shaping views on presidentialism, and reflections of the centre–periphery cleavage in Turkish politics are also visible. The shift of the Turkish nationalist constituency’s views in favour of presidentialism has been a significant trend in the aftermath of the June 2015 general election.

Protests and Repression in New Democracies

Elected governments sometimes deal with protests by authorizing the police to use less-lethal tools of repression: water cannons, tear gas, rubber bullets, and the like. When these tactics fail to end protests and instead spark larger, backlash movements , some governments reduce the level of violence but others increase it, causing widespread injuries and loss of life. We study three recent cases of governments in new democracies facing backlash movements. Their decision to scale up or scale back police repression reflected the governments’ levels of electoral security. Secure governments with relatively unmovable majorities behind them feel freer to apply harsh measures. Less secure governments, those with volatile electoral support, contemplate that their hold on power might weaken should they inflict very harsh treatment on protesters; they have strong incentives to back down. Our original survey research and interviews with civilian authorities, police officials, and protest organizers in Turkey, Brazil, and Ukraine allow us to evaluate this explanation as well as a number of rival accounts. Our findings imply that elected governments that rest on very stable bases of support may be tempted to deploy tactics more commonly associated with authoritarian politics.

Ethnicity and religiosity-based prejudice in Turkey: Evidence from a survey experiment

Threat perceptions and prejudice underlie a large number of intergroup conflicts. In this article we explore prejudicial attitudes in Turkey regarding ethnic Kurdish and devout Muslim religious identities as opposed to Turkish and less observant, secular identities. Utilizing a population-based survey experiment, we use vignettes about a hypothetical family as a neighbour, with randomized ethnicity and religiosity-related cues. We find evidence for prejudice against Kurdish ethnicity, especially among older, lowly-educated and economically dissatisfied individuals. The level of prejudice against Kurds does not seem to be related to the relative size of the Kurdish population in the local population. We do not observe prejudice against devout Muslim or less observant, secular identities. Our findings indicate that prejudice against Kurds in Turkey does not have a sui generis nature. The lack of prejudice across the religiosity dimension suggests that major socio-political cleavages do not necessarily affect intergroup attitudes.

Populism in Turkey

The central cleavage of Turkish politics has created a fertile ground for certain parties to adopt a populist strategy since the first free and fair elections in 1950. In contemporary Turkish politics, the leadership of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) harbors the core characteristics of doing politics on a populist platform. We back up this claim by highlighting the political discourse of AKP’s long-time leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who extols populist principles, and by describing the institutional changes brought upon to concentrate power in the hands of the executive branch. We also examine the prevalence and correlates of populist attitudes in the Turkish population by drawing on an original, nationally representative survey. We find that populist attitudes are quite prevalent in the Turkish electorate, and support for populism is significantly and positively related to being a partisan of the incumbent AKP. Rather than discontent, the fact that the AKP, a party with a populist agenda, has long been in power seems to be the key driver of mass populist attitudes in Turkey where supporters of this party have internalized the core premises of populism to a significant extent.

Why Do People Join Backlash Protests? Lessons from Turkey

When people learn that demonstrators are being subjected to harsh treatment by the police, sometimes their reaction is to join demonstrations. What explains the potentially mobilizing power of repression? Information-oriented theories posit that repression changes people’s beliefs about the likely success of the protests or the type of the government, thus encouraging them to join. Social–psychological theories posit that repression provokes a moral and emotional reaction from bystanders, and these emotional reactions are mobilizing. Our research offers a rare opportunity to test these theories, empirically, against one another. We offer experimental evidence from Turkey after the 2013 Gezi uprising. In this setting, emotional reactions appear to be the link between repression and backlash mobilization. Information-oriented theories of backlash mobilization may be less germane in democracies, in which people already have access to information about their governments, and in highly polarized polities, in which few people’s political affinities are up for grabs.