Browsing by Subject "Diversionary use of force"

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Open Access
Economic hardships, polarizing rhetoric, and diversionary use of force
(2021-05) Yılmaz, Burak Kazim
Experiencing economic and social problems make state leaders lose popularity among their constituencies. Eventually, they are likely to lose their positions, if problems persist. Motivated to stay in office, leaders resort to different policies as long as political systems that they exist within allow. Use of force to divert public attention is one of these policies. Scholars who have studied this phenomenon suggested several mechanisms to trace state leaders' efforts for creating diversionary conflict. In this thesis, I offer a novel approach which adds socities' political polarization into the relationship between leaders' need for diversion and conflict initiation. To test this approach, I chose post-2014 presidential election Turkey as my case study. The case is rich in content because of the deteriorating economic indicators, presence of a polarized society, and having different violent conflicts. I measured the polarization variable through president's speeches by using computational text analysis methods. Then, I conducted regression analyses to detect the relationship between polarizing rhetoric and diversionary use of force. My findings reveal that the ruling party elite has followed different practices in using polarizing elements in their speeches for conflicts inside and outside Turkey. While rhetoric becomes more polarized in the times that armed forces conduct more operations to PKK, it becomes less when the number of conflicts abroad increases.
Open Access
The Politics of diversion: autocratic regimes and the use of force in times of domestic predicaments
(2024-05) Sevindik, Ali
When faced with a hard-to-solve domestic crisis, leaders may appeal to workaround the predicament instead of trying to solve the issue to ensure their survival as the political authority. One of the instrumental ways of overcoming the challenges of the domestic crisis through diverting the attention of public opinion could be using force against an ethnic or political group within the borders or against a country. The literature is dominated by research that heavily focuses on the diversionary motivations of democracies as they have electoral processes that give an opportunity to citizens to reward or punish the leaders for their successes or failures. However, very few studies examine the diversionary motivations of autocracies. In this thesis, I aimed to address this gap and contribute to the literature by examining the diversionary motivations of different types of autocratic regimes. I hypothesized that personalist and military autocracies are more conflict-prone than other autocracies in times of domestic crises. I constructed monadic and dyadic datasets by compiling available data. The monadic dataset consists of 258 observations of 59 countries between 1990-2001 whereas the dyadic dataset contains 123,819 observations of dyad-years between 1990-2001. To test my hypotheses, I conducted logistic regression analyses. My findings from the analyses demonstrated mixed results for the relations among domestic crises, regime type, and external and internal use of force but affirmed that personalist autocracies are more inclined to use force when faced with a domestic crisis vis-à-vis non-personalist autocracies.