Electoral Integrity and Populism in Divided Societies: Case Study of Turkey

• In Event: Electoral Accountability, Integrity, & Security

Abstract

The political polarization, populist discourses and enlargement of risk society inside the global context have been causing damages on electoral integrity and legitimacy. Domestic election monitoring is a necessity in order to establish fair, secure and transparent election process. In Turkey, there is one domestic monitoring organization, Vote and Beyond and few non-governmental organizations trying to monitor elections. Our two key questions for this article are: “how domestic monitoring organization can help to establish electoral integrity and legitimacy in Turkey?” and “how populist discourse of Erdogan affects the electoral integrity?” According to these questions, this article aims to analyze the activities of Vote and Beyond aiming to develop electoral knowledge of Turkish people and legitimacy of the elections in Turkey; the impact of volunteers working within the NGO; the security problems encountered especially in the eastern part of Turkey and the populist discourses during the latest elections. Our analysis will be based on in-depth interview with the founders and on a survey realized with volunteers of Vote and Beyond and a discourse analysis of Erdogan. We propose as a hypothesis that Turkey’s social and political polarization and the development of global risks by populist and post-truth politics have negative impacts on electoral integrity even if Turkish civil society has been tying to mobilize a large amount of people during the elections. Turkey’s case might be practical in order to understand the global electoral integrity problems in a comparative perspective.

Author

• Işıl Zeynep Turkan Ipek, Yeditepe University