Behavioral Foundations of Opposition Alliance Support under Electoral Authoritarianism

• In Event: Autocratic Institutions

Abstract

Pre-electoral alliances are often crucial for opposition forces in electoral authoritarian regimes to challenge the incumbent and potentially secure victory. However, forming alliances between ideologically diverse parties risks alienating voters who strongly oppose certain alliance members. Addressing this trade-off, we develop a theory distinguishing between three spatial rationales that drive voter support for alliances: minimal, maximal, and median pairwise distances to the members of the coalition.

Conducting a face-to-face vignette experiment and an accompanying survey across 26 Turkish cities before the 2023 general elections, our study reveals that a majority of voters who favour any party within the alliance (Millet İttifakı) also support the opposition alliance as a whole. While supporters of the opposition parties who strongly dislike another party within the alliance are less likely to support the opposition alliance, exposing respondents to proposed democratic reforms advocated by the alliance's candidate mitigates their aversion towards other alliance parties. A similar analysis shows that exposing the supporters of the incumbent alliance to proposed economic reforms by the opposition candidate diminishes the support for the governing party and the alliance as a whole, but not the support for the incumbent candidate.

These findings have implications for effectively forming strategic alliances to counter authoritarianism.

Authors

• Ugur Ozdemir, University of Edinburgh

• Marc S. Jacob, University of Notre Dame