Why Leave a Dominant Party? Party Defection under Competitive Authoritarianism

• In Event: Strategies of Authoritarian Regimes

Abstract

In almost any regime context, the choice to defect from the party in government risks political marginalization and economic repercussions. In competitive authoritarian regimes, defections should be diminishingly rare when a dominant party controls the distribution of economic benefits and enjoys what Levitsky and Way (2010) call “an uneven playing field,” due to unequal access to resources, media, and the law. Yet, in Turkey, where the ruling AKP is exactly this kind of dominant party, hundreds of party elites and rank-and-file party members—defined as party representatives who manage the party’s regional and municipal headquarters—have defected to the opposition since 2017. According to a cost-benefit logic based on material incentives, which predominates in the literature (Reuter and Szakonyi 2019; Esen and Gumuscu 2020), we would expect loyalty. This paper provides a novel approach for explaining defections by party members whose actions defy economic incentives.

Existing explanations for defections from dominant parties tend to discount ideological considerations and are therefore incomplete (Hale and Colton 2017; Reuter and Gandhi 2011; Reuter and Szakonyi 2019). Political power and material resources are better conceived as instrumental variables and have little value for an individual if ideological preferences are completely ignored (Kuran 1991). Therefore, this article takes an ideational approach, testing the argument that recent defections from the AKP are motivated by a commitment to democratic values. It shows that individuals who have defected from the ruling AKP to the opposition in Turkey are distinguished by the importance they place on independence and self-determination, but not pluralism or tolerance of minorities and outgroups. The underlying values that motivate political defections in the context of this competitive authoritarian regime therefore bear greater affinity to the principles of electoral and procedural—rather than liberal—democracy. Defectors from the AKP believe that the election process should be respected and prefer de-personalized, institutional mechanisms of decision-making, but also believe that some groups are rightfully excluded from participation in politics.

Methodologically, this article uses longitudinal analysis of social media behavior to observe the long-term motivations of political actors, and to distinguish between the material and ideological reasons for defections. Therefore, this approach makes both empirical and methodological contributions. I use party member data shared publicly by all of Turkey’s major parties to build a list of over 300 individuals who have defected from the AKP over the past five years. Then, I use Twitter data going back to 2011 to map these individuals’ ideological networks and democratic sentiment. Almost every Turkish politician has been an active user of Twitter since its introduction in the country. Network analysis tools utilize shared connections—the frequency of likes and retweets between users, who they follow in common and who follows them—to determine how “close” and how “far” individuals are from each other (Csardi and Nepusz 2006). The proximity score derived from these variables—likes, follows, and shared followers—can be used to build a map of the network that individuals belong to. Extra variables, such as party identity and the known ideology of individuals in the network, can be introduced to score the ideological composition of a network. If ideological affinity or distance predicts party defection, then individuals furthest from Erdogan and the AKP’s center should defect first.

I hand code Tweets that represent extreme examples of commitment, or opposition, to principles of procedural and liberal democracy in order to build a sentiment analysis model (Benoit et al. 2018). Using this model, I map individual users’ commitment over time to these underlying value dimensions. I compare defectors’ sentiment scores with a “control group” of individuals who bear many of the same ideological and demographic characteristics of defectors, but who did not defect. This step makes it possible to test whether individuals who publicly express commitments to key democratic principles are more likely to defect from the AKP. I will use this network and sentiment analysis to build a qualitative dataset that maps individuals’ democratic values and motivations for leaving a dominant party, thereby helping us better understand how authoritarian parties collapse or remain resilient against defections.

Author

• Dean Schafer, Central European University