Pre-electoral Coalitions in Electoral Authoritarian Regimes

• In Event: Graduate Student Research Lightning Round: Authoritarian Regimes, Contested Spaces

Abstract

Why are some opposition parties in electoral autocratic regimes able to form a pre-electoral coalition successfully, while others fail to coordinate? What explains the cooperation of opposition parties in regimes where electoral politics is an uneven playing field and harassment of opposition is a ubiquitous practice? This research argues that opposition parties that can successfully resolve intra-party conflict and inter-party polarization can form a pre-electoral coalition. The research to date has focused on coalitions in democracies and underscored the institutional characteristics. A handful of articles on autocracies highlight the level of repression as the primary explanatory factor in the formation of coalitions. My research, however, aims to retain the importance of these two fundamental factors while achieving a more dynamic model. This project takes internal party politics and divergences between parties as the crux of coalition behavior. Propositions are tested with a mixed-methods approach. First, I use an original dataset of pre-electoral coalitions in electoral authoritarian regimes. Second, a small-N analysis of pre-electoral coalitions is used to understand how within and across party differences play out in disparate political contexts. Lastly, fieldwork using a within-case comparison of the 2015 legislative election (negative case) and 2018 general election and 2019 local election (positive cases) in Turkey will examine the mechanisms in qualitative case study.

Author

• Ozlem Tuncel, Georgia State University