(iPoster) Cartelization before Democratization? Opposition Coordination in Turkey

• In Event: Poster Session: Democracy and Autocracy I

Abstract

What factors explain the failure of a united opposition to win elections under competitive authoritarian re-gimes? Pre-electoral alliances increase the opposition’s chances of electoral victory. However, a significant portion of opposition alliances still result in electoral defeat. While previous literature mainly focused on the exogenous effects of opposition unification and electoral victory, we provide an endogenous account of the transformation of opposition alliances that leads to opposition defeat. Building on the public choice and par-ty politics literature, we emphasize that in a polarized environment with limited influence from voters, oppo-sition alliances can become prone to cartelization where alliance members prioritize fulfilling their material interests rather than winning elections. We analyze our theory by focusing on the case of Turkey’s 2023 leg-islative and presidential elections. Employing the process tracing method on interview evidence from the executives of Turkey’s main opposition alliance, we find that in the period leading up to the election, an asymmetrical mutual dependence framework led the pre-electoral alliance to deviate from its initial goals of winning elections to focus on cartelizing the political field for the distribution of potential spoils of a regime change. This led alliance members to choose a candidate and governance model that would maximize their benefits rather than appeal to the greatest mass of voters. As a result, Erdoğan beat the opposition candi-date Kılıçdaroğlu comfortably to obtain another mandate. Our findings make unique theoretical contributions and suggest new avenues of research about opposition coordination in competitive authoritarian regimes.

Authors

• Salih Yasun, Virginia Military Institute

• Burak Bilgehan Ozpek, TOBB University of Economics and Technology