Browsing by Subject "Electoral autocracy"

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Open Access
Embattled ballots, quiet streets: Competitive authoritarianism and dampening anti-government protests in Turkey
(Routledge, 2022-09-16) Kahvecioğlu, Anıl; Patan, S.
Mass protests frequently occur in electoral autocracies. However, the opposite is true in Turkey, despite mounting grievances and a strong opposition presence with institutional resources. We argue that competitive authoritarian regimes, a subset of electoral autocracies, may dampen mass protests, allowing the opposition an opportunity to defeat the incumbents through elections. Studying Turkey’s main opposition party, we identify three mechanisms that show how politicians strategically respond to the regime’s incentives and constraints leading to protest-averse behaviour. First, the regime’s repression capacity discourages the opposition from openly supporting a mass protest. Second, the opposition learns to target the median voter, which leads to political moderation and protest averseness. Finally, prospective electoral success reinforces the opposition’s commitment to a ballot-centred approach.
Open Access
Partisanship, electoral autocracy, and citizen perceptions of party system polarization
(Springer, 2022-12) Just, Aida
This paper examines how partisanship and electoral autocracy (vis-à-vis democracy) influence people’s perceptions of party system polarization in their country. Although partisanship generally enhances subjective party system polarization, I posit that this relationship depends on who is in power and the nature of political regime. Cognitive dissonance between losing an election and believing that one’s party is the best motivates partisans of parties out of power to see their country’s parties as less ideologically distinct compared to partisans of governing parties. Political regimes matter too because higher stakes of political competition and skewed information environment in electoral autocracies not only encourage all citizens to see parties as more polarized, but also magnify the positive impact of partisanship—particularly co-partisanship with governing parties—on subjective party system polarization. Using individual-level data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (1996–2019), the empirical analyses support these expectations, even when accounting for party system polarization based on expert party placements. These findings have important implications for scholarly debates on partisanship, electoral autocracy, and the nature of subjective electoral supply in contemporary electoral regimes. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.