The President’s Men: Authoritarian Coalition Building via Executive Appointments

• In Event: Elites & Succession Under Democracy & Autocracy

Abstract

If democratic backsliding occurs due to the gradual undermining of democratic institutions by incumbent presidents and prime ministers (Bermeo 2016; Svolik 2015), then which institutions are most vulnerable to manipulation by these self-aggrandizing executives? Inferring from the literature on authoritarian stability, the usual suspects are political parties (Brownlee 2007; Magaloni 2008), legislatures (Gandhi 2008), elections (Blaydes 2010), cabinet appointments (Arriola 2009), and advisory councils (Boix and Svolik 2013). I argue that cabinet positions and top-level advisor appointments provide would-be autocrats the quickest and most effective means to coopt elites and build a stable authoritarian coalition. Such appointments represent a mechanism for making promises of patronage that are more credible and more directly under the executive’s control than patronage facilitated by their party. In other words, a leader with expressly authoritarian ambitions would prefer to use the executive to build their coalition, rather than their party, because parties are accountable to a wider assortment of actors and are more likely to be governed internally by democratic norms (Mainwaring 2018; Kaufman 2011). Elites who join the executive’s coalition via such appointments have incentives to maintain their privileged access and therefore are more likely to support institutional changes that entrench the position of the current executive.

This article uses the case of Turkey to examine this process of elite cooptation by a self-aggrandizing executive. I compare each of the institutions listed above by measuring the authoritarian sentiment of individuals situated in these institutions over the course of a decade of democratic backsliding. Twitter data going back to 2010 provides a record of the attitudes of elites as they join and leave Erdogan’s coalition and makes it easy to compare the attitudes of elites in the executive branch with those from the ruling party in parliament and in regional and municipal party headquarters. To operationalize authoritarian attitudes I use four indicators developed by Linz (1978, 30) for the “disloyal opposition.” The first indicator is a weak commitment to the democratic “rules of the game,” including undermining the legitimacy of elections or encouraging extraconstitutional means to take political power. The second is a denial of the legitimacy of political opponents insofar as they are defamed as corrupt, subversive, foreign agents, or constituting a threat to national security. The third is toleration or even encouragement of violence by actors close to the incumbent. The fourth aspect of authoritarian behavior in democratic politics is the willingness and readiness to restrict the civil liberties of political opponents, including press freedom, freedom of movement, and freedom of association (Linz 1978, 31; Gerschewski 2020). I start by manually coding tweets to build an index of authoritarian expressions on these four dimensions. After that, I use quintessential texts from this index to facilitate supervised machine learning: I choose tweets that serve as extreme examples on either end of the four dimensions mentioned above. The machine learning program uses these examples to “learn” and map other tweets I have not seen onto these four dimensions (Benoit 2020). The result is a ten-year-long measure (from 2010 to 2020) of the authoritarian sentiment of 614 parliamentarians, regional and municipal party leaders, and individuals who have had appointments in Erdogan’s cabinet and advisory council. I also map the network these individuals belong to according to who they follow, retweet, and are followed by. In essence, I will have panel data on each of these individuals. I expect to see a two-fold process among executive appointees: some individuals will adopt more authoritarian attitudes, while others with more stable democratic commitments will defect. And, a cluster of authoritarian elites will develop first in the executive, before the other institutions examined in this study.

This article clarifies the role of different institutions at different stages of the process of democratic backsliding, breakdown, and authoritarian consolidation. While political parties and the legislature are stabilizing forces for elite authoritarian coalitions, the institution of the executive is more vulnerable to quick and consequential changes in personnel. The methodology developed in this article also provides a powerful tool for tracking the discourse and sentiment of political elites. With some adjustments for linguistic differences, this methodology could be applied to a wide number of cases.

Author

• Dean Schafer, CUNY The Graduate Center