Political Repression and Defensive Party-Building

• In Event: Political Parties in 20th Century Regime Transitions: Europe and Turkey

Abstract

Often, scholars of party politics focus on specific types of party-building activities such as recruitment of members from home constituencies, territorial expansion through branches, and professional electoral campaigns. However, when the opposition faces political repression in the form of exile, spying, and censorship, it allocates fewer resources to mass party-building and concentrates more on defensive strategies such as secret recruitment, the formation of underground cells, and operating in exile. I hypothesize that defensive strategies are likely to impede the formation of the mass-mobilizing party machinery. Specifically, I analyze the party-building activities of the Young Turks (1889-1908) who established the first organized opposition in the Ottoman Empire, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP). To examine the causal effect of political repression, I exploit a natural experiment in which an exogenous European intervention in Ottoman Macedonia (provinces of Kosovo, Monastir, and Salonica) gradually ended Ottoman rule and rendered Sultan Abdülhamid's political repression ineffective between 1903- 1908. The intervention created more liberal setting where the CUP activists built a mass-mobilizing party machinery and successfully executed the 1908 Constitutional Revolution.

My empirical strategy is multi-method in nature, drawing on the strengths of archival research and statistical analysis. To test my theory, I conduct a historically-minded within-case analysis of party formation and democratic consolidation. I rely on primary sources made up of more than 1500 documents on repression (305 spying reports, 513 censorship decisions, and 730 exile decrees) and CUP branches (1889-1908) and electoral performance (1908-1914). I use quantitative analysis to assess how exile, censorship, and spying impacted the party-building activities, specifically territorial expansion and political propaganda between 1889-1908. Finally, I exploit a natural experiment to test the causal effect of political repression on party-building.

I contribute to the literature on party formation and add to broader recent research on democratic consolidation. First, I extend the temporal boundaries of studies on Turkish democratization by consulting the historical record that largely ignored the legacies of repression. Second, I expand our understanding of how opposition in a traditional, industrially underdeveloped agrarian society, where resources for mass-mobilization were mostly absent, established a party organization. Hence, my analysis yields substantive theoretical insights beyond cases in Europe and Latin America.

Author

• Firat Kimya, Swarthmore College