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Framing electoral impropriety: the strategic use of allegations of wrong-doing in
election campaigns
ABSTRACT: Concerns about electoral integrity have increasingly become the focus of
political science analysis in recent years, but there has been very little systematic research on
the strategic use of allegations of electoral wrong-doing for political advantage. Drawing on
the literatures on legitimacy and electoral integrity, this paper develops a theoretical
perspective on the strategic use of allegations of electoral impropriety for electoral ends
which, when such allegations are unjustified, constitutes a previously under-explored form of
‘meta-manipulation’. An original dataset, based on press reports from Turkey at the time of
the 2014 local and June 2015 parliamentary elections, is used to test these hypotheses. The
analysis shows that the governing party predominantly accused opposition parties of violent
practices. The opposition parties, on the other hand, used allegations of electoral fraud and
other forms of misconduct coupled with violence accusations against the governing party.
The stylized democratic vision of informed voters has been brought into question in recent
years as the result of a dramatic increase in the amount of information to which the average
citizen is exposed, and a commensurate rise in the variability of information quality. In the
era of ‘post-truth politics’, political commentators and political scientists alike are attuned to
the potential questionability of factual claims made during electoral campaigns. With the
advent of social media, electoral campaigners can bypass the filtering process of traditional
media and access voters directly. Under these circumstances, citizens risk being exposed to a
large number of empirical claims that they do not always have the competence to evaluate,
and information of this sort can and does shape their views.
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One of the most common arenas of campaign discussion is the electoral process itself.
This is true even in established democracies such as the US and the UK, where recent
election campaigns have been shot through with competing claims about possible fraud and
other electoral impropriety.1 It is all the more true in competitive authoritarian contexts where
electoral integrity is often undermined and where new media are used to publicize allegations
of wrong-doing and to mobilize popular support for clean election campaigns or campaigns
to overturn the results of polls deemed to have been seriously marred by fraud.2 Though such
allegations sometimes have a strong grounding in objective truth, especially in less
democratic contexts, they also play an important strategic role as part of campaign strategies.
Allegations of fraud, campaign finance abuses, intimidation, violence and other forms of
electoral manipulation are frequently used to seek to discredit electoral rivals, or to discredit
the outcome of a race that has already been declared.
Yet though the study of electoral integrity and misconduct has blossomed in recent
years,3 we have limited understanding of the strategic use of impropriety allegations in
electoral campaigns. There is ample anecdotal evidence to suggest that they can be effective
1 Birch and ElSafoury, “Fraud, Plot, or Collective Delusion? Social Media and Perceptions of Electoral Misconduct in the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum”; Brian J Fogarty, Jessica Curtis and David C Kimball, “News Attention to Voter Fraud in the 2008 and 2012 US Elections.”2 Larry Diamond et al., “Liberation Technology”; Gromping, “Transparent Elections: Domestic Election Monitors, Agenda-Building, and Electoral Integrity”; Howard, The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy; Ifukor, “‘Elections’ or ‘Selections’? Blogging and Twittering the Nigerian 2007 General Elections”; Hänska-Ahy and Shapour, “Who Is Reporting the Protests?: Converging Practices of Citizen Journalists and Two BBC World Service Newsrooms, from Iran’s Election Protests to the Arab Uprisings.”3 Birch, Elect. Malpract.; Norris, Why Electoral Integrity Matters; Norris, Why Elections Fail; Schedler, The Politics of Uncertainty: Sustaining and Subverting Electoral Authoritarianism; Simpser, “Does Electoral Manipulation Discourage Voter Turnout? Evidence from Mexico.”
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in shaping popular perceptions;4 however, there have been virtually no systematic assessment
of when, how and why use is made of such strategies by electoral contenders.
This paper focuses on a very common set of strategies: the use of allegations of
electoral malfeasance to undermine the political legitimacy of rival electoral contestants in
the context of competitive authoritarianism. Specifically, we consider the incentives of
political actors to use allegations of misconduct and violence against their opponents. In
many cases, these allegations will be based on actual wrong-doing, but in other cases they
will be exaggerations or baseless claims. Our concern is not to assess electoral impropriety as
such, but to examine the discursive use made in electoral campaigns of accounts of actions
portrayed as illegitimate.
Our core claim is that incumbents are more likely to issue allegations of violence
against their political opponents and associated non-state actors, whereas opposition parties
are more likely to resort to allegations of misconduct. As detailed below, these suppositions
are based on the resources available to incumbent and opposition parties, and the credibility
of different strategies. In as much as impropriety allegations are not based entirely on actual
irregularities, the phenomenon studied here can be seen as a previously under-explored form
of electoral manipulation.
1. Elections, Democracy and Legitimacy
The classic democratic model of electoral competition views elections as contests over
competing policy packages, but in many contexts, particularly those that obtain in less
democratized settings, this model is far from the reality. Elections can and are manipulated in
a wide variety of ways that make them poor mechanisms for realizing democratic principles
4 Birch, “Perceptions of Electoral Fairness and Voter Turnout”; Cantú and García-Ponce, “Partisan Losers’ Effects: Perceptions of Electoral Integrity in Mexico”; Carreras and Irepoǧlu, “Trust in Elections, Vote Buying, and Turnout in Latin America”; Uscinski and Parent, American Conspiracy Theories.
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of equality and accountability. The various ways in which elections are manipulated,
commonly denoted by the terms malpractice or misconduct, and contrasted with electoral
integrity, can be divided into manipulation of electoral laws, manipulation of voter behavior
and manipulation of electoral procedures.5 A burgeoning literature on electoral manipulation
has served to clarify the circumstances under which elections are subject to malpractice, as
well as the measures that can take to prevent this. 6 States with high levels of electoral
misconduct are often referred to as having competitive authoritarian systems where
competitive elections are held but not on a level playing field, such that the ruling party or
grouping enjoys a distinct advantage and is typically able to manipulate electoral outcomes to
ensure that it remains in power.7 Competitive authoritarian settings are ones in which civil
society freedoms and judicial independence are often compromised and where electoral
authorities are frequently suspected of being partisan.8 In short, they are regimes where
legitimacy is at issue.
A survey of relevant literature suggests that in many competitive authoritarian
systems, elections are as much competitions over legitimacy as they are competitions over
policies or competence; electoral campaigns all too often degenerate into slanging matches in
which the opposing sides seek to discredit each other and undermine their claims to be fit to
take part in the political contest.9 In other words, contexts where electoral integrity is 5 Birch, Electoral Malpractice.6 E.g. Norris, Why Electoral Integrity Matters; Norris, Why Elections Fail; Norris, Strengthening Electoral Integrity; ehoucq and Kolev, “Varying the Un-Variable: Social Structure, Electoral Formulae, and Election Quality”; Magaloni, Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and Its Demise in Mexico; Schedler, The Politics of Uncertainty: Sustaining and Subverting Electoral Authoritarianism.7 Levitsky and Way, Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War; Schedler, “The Logic of Electoral Authoritarianism”; Schedler, “Sources of Competition under Electoral Authoritarianism.”8 Birch and Van Ham, “Getting Away with Foul Play? The Importance of Formal and Informal Oversight Institutions for Electoral Integrity”; Magaloni, Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and Its Demise in Mexico; Norris, Why Electoral Integrity Matters; Norris, Why Elections Fail.9 Levitsky and Way, Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War, 7–13; Norris, Why Electoral Integrity Matters; Schedler, The Politics of Uncertainty: Sustaining
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compromised are contexts in which opportunities arise to gain electoral advantage by
manipulating perceptions of the robustness of the electoral process. When the legitimacy of
the electoral process is compromised, this has knock-on effects for the legitimacy of the
regime.10 Though lack of electoral legitimacy has often been observed by analysts of the
politics of competitive authoritarian states,11 there has as yet been little systematic analysis of
the discursive strategies used by electoral contenders to discredit their rivals. If allegations of
impropriety are indeed employed strategically in the electoral arena, this can be viewed as a
form of ‘meta-manipulation’ that stands alongside the well-known list of irregularities which
plague voting processes in competitive authoritarian contexts. Yet it cannot be assumed that
strategies of delegitimization via bogus claims of electoral malfeasance will be universally
used, as they carry costs of exposure by the media or non-acceptance by the electorate; such
claims are only useful to a party when they are believed.
In competitive authoritarian states, institutions are often a major object of political
contestation, even if the outcome of electoral contests is more predictable.12 In other words,
political debate revolves around the legitimacy of the rules of the game rather than the
relative merits of competing policy proposals. The legitimacy of political actors is often also
an object of intense debate, including the electoral contestants themselves, as well as actors
such as the media, civil society, and other non-state groups whose right to contribute to
political discussion is unquestioned in the context of established and well-functioning
democracy.13 McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly relate the way in which the Rwandan genocide of
and Subverting Electoral Authoritarianism, 87–98.10 Norris, Why Electoral Integrity Matters, 113–32.11 Norris, Why Electoral Integrity Matters; Schedler, The Politics of Uncertainty: Sustaining and Subverting Electoral Authoritarianism.12 Przeworski, “Democracy as a Contingent Outcome of Conflict”; Schedler, “The Menu of Manipulation”; Schedler, The Politics of Uncertainty: Sustaining and Subverting Electoral Authoritarianism.13 Levitsky and Way, Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War; Norris, Why Electoral Integrity Matters; Norris, Martinez i Coma, and Gromping, “The Year in Elections, 2014”; Schedler, The Politics of Uncertainty: Sustaining and Subverting Electoral Authoritarianism; Randall and Svåsand, “Party Institutionalization in New
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1994 was fuelled by claims that Tutsis were traitors and thus merited death.14 Similarly,
Adrienne Lebas notes how exclusionary rhetoric on the part of the Zimbabwe’s two main
parties – ZANU-PF and the MDC – served to foment a climate of violence where each party
framed popular allegiance to its rival as betraying lack of ‘loyalty to the nation’.15 Lisa
Blaydes likewise recounts how the Mubarak regime in Egypt used both formal and informal
strategies to discredit the Muslim Brotherhood, following its inability to eliminate the
organization through repressive means.16
These strategies are all based on the politics of delegitimization where political
adversaries seek to gain advantage by undermining each other’s supposed legitimacy as
contenders for power. The concept of delegitimization has its origins in psychology, where it
is used to describe a process of classification that “entails removal of a claim or a claimant
from the domain of moral acceptability or moral obligation.17 In politics, legitimacy claims
tend most often to play themselves out in terms of claims to take part in rule. Commenting on
the role of legitimacy in ethnic politics, Horowitz notes that “those whose full membership in
the polity is placed in doubt by exclusionary policies and symbols that connote exclusion are
likely to advance their own symbolic claims to equality”.18 The same logic can be extended to
other forms of political identity, including partisan identity.
Though political delegitimization has been explored in the literature on
authoritarianism, its use in the electoral context has received little attention. Strategies of
electoral delegitimization are typically about framing narratives that associate political
opponents with wrong-doing proximate to the electoral context. Wrong-doing can take a
number of forms, but the most prominent are the types of electoral malpractice discussed
Democracies.”14 McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly, Dynamics of Contention., 339.15 Lebas, “Polarization as Craft - Party Formation and State Violence in Zimbabwe,” 420.16 Blaydes, Elections and Distributive Politics in Mubarak’s Egypt, 148–70.17 Kelman, “Reflections on Social and Psychological Processes of Legitimization Delegitimization,” 58.18 Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, 219.
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above, as well as electoral violence (including coercion, intimidation and physical attacks).
Electoral violence can be seen as a subset of electoral malpractice, but it can also be seen as
an alternative strategy designed to sabotage electoral institutions. A small but growing
literature on electoral violence has considered whether misconduct and violence might be
complements or substitutes in the electoral arena, which no clear consensus emerging.19 At
the same time, it has become clear that violence is a qualitatively different type of
manipulation from the fiddling of vote counts or vote-buying, in that violence is typically
designed to obstruct electoral processes.20
For analytic purposes, it is useful to consider why different political actors might use
delegitimization differently.
Our baseline expectation or null hypothesis is that actors of all partisan stripes will
content themselves with highlighting actual instances of malfeasance by their opponents and
will refrain from exaggerating or inventing claims. One might also expect that they would
admit to breaches of electoral integrity on their own part, in order to isolate perpetrators and
prevent an electoral backlash that would result from claims that lack credibility, thus:
H0: Incumbent and opposition actors will report and acknowledge, but will not distort
or invent, actors of electoral misconduct or violence.
For the reasons set out above, there are also reasons to believe that both incumbent
and the opposition might adopt delegitimization strategies. And we posit that the strategies of
the two actors will differ. We hypothesize that those in power and those seeking to dislodge
19 Claes, Electing Peace; Van Ham and Lindberg, From Sticks to Carrots; Collier and Vicente, “Violence, Bribery, and Fraud”; Collier and Vicente, “Votes and Violence”. 20 Birch and Muchlinski, “The Dataset of Countries at Risk of Electoral Violence;” Bhasin and Gandhi, “Timing and Targeting of State Repression in Authoritarian Elections”; Hafner-Burton, Hyde, and Jablonski, “When Do Governments Resort to Election Violence?”; Fjelde and Höglund, “Electoral Institutions and Electoral Violence in Sub-Saharan Africa.”
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them both have incentives to use the delegitimization strategies that are most plausible, and
that plausibility is in turn conditioned by common patterns of actual electoral manipulation.
Thus the discursive use of delegitimization magnified and in some cases distorts actual
practices. Incumbent actors typically have the greatest ability to manipulate the electoral
machinery and thus to deliver fraud, though this tactic many well be available to the
opposition in those areas of the country that are under opposition control. Both incumbent
and opposition have the resources to shape elections via obstructive techniques that involve
the use of force, though the state’s putative monopoly on the means of force places it at a
coercive advantage.
Let us unpack this argument. In developing delegitimizing narratives, the opposition
benefits from the fact that the electoral machinery is largely controlled by the state, and its
integrity is thus the responsibility of incumbent political leaders. Elections are huge logistical
exercises in which there are always at least some problems, even in the absence of any
manipulative intent. This fact provides oppositions with discursive ammunition. Two
alternative approaches can be delineated, depending on whether the opposition believes it has
a genuine chance of electoral success. First, the opposition may seek to discredit an electoral
contest in advance via allegations of fraud if it believes it has no real chance of electoral
victory. Strategies designed to prime the electorate to suspect fraud have been detected in a
variety of contexts.21 In some settings allegations of fraud are accompanied by election
boycotts, as in Cameroon in 1997 when the opposition boycotted in protest against the
president’s refusal to establish an independent electoral management body, or in Venezuela
in 2005 when the opposition voiced suspicions about newly-introduced voting machines.22 In
21 Beaulieu and Hyde, “In the Shadow of Democracy Promotion: Strategic Manipulation, International Observers, and Election Boycotts”; Beaulieu, Electoral Protest and Democracy in the Developing World; Schedler, The Politics of Uncertainty: Sustaining and Subverting Electoral Authoritarianism chp. 9; Hyde and Marinov, “Information and Self-Enforcing Democracy: The Role of International Election Observation.”22 Beaulieu, Electoral Protest and Democracy in the Developing World, 52–55.
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other contexts, protests accompany active electoral contestation by opposition candidates. A
good example of this pattern is Malaysia, where civil society groups have regularly
questioned the integrity of electoral institutions.23 In Belarus also, oppositions have routinely
challenged electoral procedures throughout the electoral cycle.24
Second, the opposition may accept electoral procedures in the run-up to the poll, but
then cry foul after the election takes place in order to put pressure on authorities to re-run part
or all of the race or to make other concessions. This was a common - and in some cases
successful - demand in the so-called ‘colored revolutions’ in Eastern Europe.25 In Mexico
under the Revolutionary Institutional Party post-electoral protests against fraud became an
institutionalized part of the repertoire of electoral activities.26 International concern that
accompanied the deadly post-electoral protests in Kenya in 2007/8 led to a series of major
electoral reforms designed to improve electoral conduct in subsequent contests.27 Such
mobilizational appeals are often especially successful among adherents of the losing party,
who have been found to be more critical of electoral integrity in the ‘loser’s consent’
literature.28
23 Chin and Wong, “Malaysia’s Electoral Upheaval.”24 Mochtak, “Terrorism and Political Violence Fighting and Voting: Mapping Electoral Violence in the Region of Post-Communist Europe Fighting and Voting: Mapping Electoral Violence in the Region of Post-Communist Europe.”25 Beissinger, “Structure and Example in Modular Political Phenomena: The Diffusion of Bulldozer/Rose/Orange/Tulip Revolutions”; Bunce and Wolchik, “Defeating Dictators: Electoral Change and Stability in Competitive Authoritarian Regimes”; McFaul, “Ukraine Imports Democracy: External Influences on the Orange Revolution”; Tucker, “Enough! Electoral Fraud, Collective Action Problems, and Post-Communist Colored Revolutions”; White, “Is There a Pattern?”26 Eisenstadt, “Mexico’s Postelectoral Concertacesiones: The Rise and Demise of a Substitutive Informal Institution.”27 Union, “EU Election Observation Mission to Kenya 2013 - European External Action Service”; Klaus and Mitchell, “Land Grievances and the Mobilization of Electoral Violence: Evidence from Côte d’ivoire and Kenya.”28 Anderson et al., Losers’ Consent: Elections and Democratic Legitimacy; Cantú and García-Ponce, “Partisan Losers’ Effects: Perceptions of Electoral Integrity in Mexico”; Uscinski and Parent, American Conspiracy Theories, 22, 91–92, 138–43.
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Third, the state’s greater access to the means of coercion make allegations of state
repression relatively credible in many contexts. State repression is a common complaint in
many contexts, even democratic ones, and it is typically plausible that at least some state
actors might have overstepped the mark in using the means of coercion at their disposal.
For all these reasons, we would expect opposition elites to have a strong incentive to
seek to tarnish the credibility of incumbent elites with allegations of fraud and violence.
Opposition parties have the most limited tools at their disposal; they can thus be expected to
use any manipulative strategy that could potentially be of benefit to them:
H1: Opposition actors will employ both allegations of misconduct and allegations of
violence.
The incumbent, for its part, is keen to limit the credibility of the opposition by linking
allegations of wrong-doing to opposition leaders. As already noted, opposition elites typically
have limited means of engaging in electoral misconduct. The most available tactic for those
without access to the levers of power is vote-buying, but this strategy may often be welcomed
or at least tolerated by large sections of the population, so criticism of this practice is likely to
be of limited use in undermining opposition credibility among the electorate. A more
promising approach is to seek to link known or suspected incidents of violence to opposition
elites in an effort to undermine their perceived commitment to democracy.
The opposition has greater incentives to employ violence as an electoral strategy than
the state, given the state’s ability to use subtle forms of electoral malpractice and yet to
maintain a veneer of democratic legitimacy; bereft of state resources, the opposition may
often see violence as one of the only viable tools at its disposal where the playing field is
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skewed to its disadvantage.29 This does not mean that the opposition will necessary employ
violent means, but it does lend plausibility to allegations of opposition-initiated violence.
Andrew Wilson describes how at the time of the 1999 presidential election in Ukraine,
associates of Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma framed Socialist opposition leader
Oleksandr Moroz with a staged attack on one of the other candidates.30 In Mali several
opposition leaders were accused of planning a coup d’état during the legislative elections of
1997.31 While opposition groups can also be expected to include violence allegations in the
charges they bring against incumbents, violence allegations should play a larger role in the
discursive strategies of the incumbent:
H2: Incumbents will use allegations of electoral violence more frequently than
allegations of misconduct.
While we do not in this analysis assess the causal efficacy of blame attributions in
altering perceptions of the legitimacy of actors, we have established compelling grounds for
believing that in the competitive authoritarian context, the actors we consider here will have
incentives to employ strategies of blame in an effort to discredit their opponents, but that the
strategies of actors will differ depending on the credibility of different claims: incumbents
have greater incentives to deploy allegations of violence, while oppositions are expected to
use a mixed strategy of alleging both misconduct and violence on the part of the incumbent.
2. The Turkish context
29 Collier and Vicente, “Violence, Bribery, and Fraud: The Political Economy of Elections in Sub-Saharan Africa”; Collier and Vicente, “Votes and Violence: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Nigeria.”30 Wilson, Virtual Politics: Faking Democracy in the Post-Soviet World, 183.31 Diawara, “Mali’s Struggle against Electoral Violence.”
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The empirical context in which we have chosen to test the above hypotheses is Turkey, a
country that has in recent years undergone considerable political change. Turkey has
experienced competitive elections since 1950. Although the number and impact of political
actors have varied since that time, competing parties have frequently employed strategies of
discursive delegitimization for political ends. Moreover, Turkey’s history of military rule and
the lingering influence of the military on Turkish politics through the latter part of the 20th
century means that the use of force is never far off the horizon of expectations of actors in
Turkish politics. This history also means that there is a clear distinction in Turkish political
culture between strategies that involve coercive force and those that entail other forms of
political manipulation. Thus, the analytic distinction detailed above between violence and
other forms of electoral misconduct is particularly apt in the Turkish context.
Turkey has since the 1970s been a hybrid state on the fuzzy border between
democracy and authoritarianism.32 It has regularly held competitive multiparty elections, yet
concerns have regularly been raised about electoral integrity, as well as about broader human
rights abuses in the country.33 Since the early 1990s, Turkey has been labeled ‘partly free’ by
Freedom House, and though elections in the country are competitive, they are not conducted
on an entirely level playing field. Figure 1 displays Turkey’s ‘electoral process’ rating over
the 2006-2017 period, based on Freedom House data. As can be seen from these data,
electoral integrity is moderately high by global standards, though it has witnessed a decline in
recent years as President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has tightened his grip on power and Turkey
can now be considered a competitive authoritarian state. At 8, Turkey’s electoral process
score at the end of the time series was very close to the global mean for this year of 7.69 and
32 Erişen and Kubicek. "Conceptualizing Democratic Consolidation in Turkey’.33 Öniş, "Monopolising the Centre”, Öniş, “Turkey’s Two Elections”, Öniş and Kutlay, "Global Shifts and the Limits of the EU’s Transformative Power in the European Periphery”, Őzbudun, “Problems of Rule of Law and Horizontal Accountability in Turkey: Defective Democracy or Competitive Authoritarianism?”
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on par with Guatemala, Malawi and Iraq. As this graph clearly shows, the 2014 and 2015
elections that are the empirical focus of the study mark the beginning of the recent objective
deterioration in electoral integrity, which makes these elections a suitable context in which to
test the hypotheses set out above, as this was a context in which allegations of electoral
malpractice began to carry more weight and to resonate more among those concerned with
the political direction taken by Turkey during this period.
Figure 1 about here
Although examples of delegitimization tactics can be found as far back as the 1950s,
these tactics have become more visible during the last two decades, an era marked by the
successive victories of Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (the Justice and Development Party,
AKP). During this period, the opposition parties launched an unprecedented number of
accusations of electoral fraud against the governing AKP, especially after 2010. These
allegations included the illegal use of overprinted ballot papers, misuse of state funds, media
censorship, the misuse of a computer-aided voter index system (SEÇSİS) and electricity cuts
during the vote count. Some noteworthy examples of these allegations are listed below:
When the Supreme Electoral Council (SEC) ordered the printing of an extra 17
million ballot papers for the 2015 June elections, the opposition parties raised
concerns about the use of these extra papers and the CHP raised the issue in the
Turkish Grand National Assembly (TGNA).34
The AKP has also regularly been accused of using the state funds to finance electoral
campaigns. When the Halkların Demokratik Partisi (People’s Democratic Party,
HDP) brought the issue to the attention of the SEC during the June 2015 elections,
their complaint was rejected.35
34 “Oy Pusulasi Neden Ihtiyacın 3 Kati Fazla Basıldı? [Why the Ballot Papers Printed 3 Times More than the Needed Amount?].”35 “YSK, HDP’nin Cumhurbaşkanı Erdoğan Ile Ilgili Başvurusunu Reddetti [SEC Rejected HDP’s Appeal about President Erdoğan].”
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The state broadcasting agency Turkish Radio and Television (TRT) decided not to air
a CHP campaign advert because it was perceived to be openly critical of the
governing AKP. The advert featured a cat walking near a transformer, referring to the
AKP’s Minister of Energy Taner Yıldız's explanation for the nationwide electricity
cuts during the 2014 local elections, which he had said occurred because a cat had
entered a transformer.36 The TRT was accused of pro-government bias and censorship
numerous times and taken to court by the CHP on several occasions.
The SEC the computer-aided electoral informatics system for collecting voter data
and election results, SEÇSİS, was designed to facilitate electoral procedures such as
registration, voting etc. However, SEÇSİS was criticized for its vulnerability to
external manipulation, and such concerns were brought to the Constitutional Court in
a case in which AKP politicians were accused of using SEÇSİS for electoral
advantage. The CHP raised the issue and the SEC, after eight months of investigation,
accepted that the SEÇSİS system does not have a security certificate, which means
that the results are open to undetected manipulation.37
The incumbent AKP, on the other hand, blamed the opposition parties for resorting to violent
tactics during election campaigns. On 23 April 2015, during an armed attack on the AKP
election centre in Batman, the son of a former AKP Member of Parliament was killed. AKP
officials blamed the opposition parties for the incident, although their guilt was never
proven.38 Likewise, when AKP parliamentary candidates were greeted with hostility by local
residents in Van – a heavily Kurdish-populated city – the AKP delegate accused the HDP of
organizing the incident.39 On 2 May 2015, AKP officials accused CHP supporters of
36 “Trafoya Kedi Girdi [A Cat Entered to the Transformer].”37 Başaran, “Devletin SEÇSİS Ile Ilgili Verdiği Cevaba Bak! [Check the ‘Answer’ of State on the Suspicions about SEÇSİS].”38 “AKP Seçim Lokaline Saldırı [Attack on the AKP Local].”39 “AKP Seçim Lokaline Saldırı [Attack on the AKP Local].”
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attacking their election van, which was canvassing in İstanbul.40 AKP district heads of
Kurdish-populated Van and Ağrı also accused the HDP of using force and coercion against
voters and village heads via the PKK (Kurdistan Worker’s Party).
Coupled with the above-mentioned episodes, there were several other violent
incidents reported in which parties of the opposition were involved. For example, on 18 April
2015, two people were taken into custody due to an armed assault aimed at the HDP
headquarters in Ankara. HDP chairman Selahattin Demirtaş claimed that 41 HDP election
offices had been subject to similar violent attacks.41 Similarly, on 30 April, an HDP election
stand in Uşak was attacked by a group; several people were injured during the fight while
electoral materials belonging to HDP were destroyed.42 Another example of an attack on the
HDP happened in Kırşehir on 14 May 2015, when a group of Turkish nationalists began
harassing HDP supporters who joined Selahattin Demirtaş in his visit to the city. Again,
several people were injured, and the police used water cannon to break up the crowd.43
On June 24, 2018, Turkish citizens went to the ballot box for the fourth time in five
years to vote in the first election to be held under the new presidential system which was
ratified by the 2017 constitutional referendum. Throughout the campaign period the tone of
the political parties and candidates was extremely confrontational. During party meetings
both sides blamed each other for being supporters of terrorism.44 During the campaign also
several violent incidents took place where the opposition parties and CHP, HDP, Felicity and
İYİ Party reported several attacks on their offices, vehicles and electoral materials coupled
with hindrances of meetings in multiple cities.45 The most controversial event of the elections 40 “CHP’liler AK Parti Seçim Karavanına Saldırdı[CHP Supporters Attacked the AKP Convoy].”41 “Demirtaş: Bugüne Kadar 41 HDP Seçim Bürosu Yakıldı [Demirtaş: 41 HDP Electoral Offices Had Been Burnt Down].”42 “Uşak’ta Tehlikeli Gerginlik [Dangerous Tension in Uşak].”43 “"HDP’nin Kırşehir Mitingine Saldırı [Attack on HDP’s Rally in Kırşehir].”44 OSCE, “International Election Observation Mission Republic of Turkey – Early Presidential and Parliamentary Elections – 24 June 2018,” 9.45 OSCE, 10.
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took place on the 14 June, when a violent shooting incident in south eastern village Suruc
between AKP campaigners and local shop-keepers, some of whom were HDP supporters, left
four people dead and eight injured.
Thus, though Turkey has a history of elections which have created legitimate governments
based on the popular will, recent developments have raised eyebrows about the integrity of
electoral processes. This makes the Turkish case a relevant context in which to probe the
research questions set out above.
3. Data and research design
The original dataset compiled for use in this study is designed to measure allegations of
electoral fraud and electoral violence in Turkey during the June 2015 parliamentary and 2014
local elections. The dataset is based on content analysis of newspaper reports for each
election, covering a period ranging from one month before to one month after each election.
We identified all documented allegations of electoral irregularities during each two-month
period, and coded each incident according to the actor making the accusation (if any) and the
actor that was the object of the accusation (if any). We carried out the content analysis on
national newspapers which are consistently listed as the most important sources of
information for Turkish citizens.46 The data were extracted from digital copies of the
newspapers according to the coding procedure described below. A broad range of newspapers
were chosen for this purpose; papers were selected to provide a comprehensive picture of
news coverage in Turkey and to ensure ideological diversity. These newspapers were coded
according to their ideological position as left, center and right; and their stance against
government as being pro-government, main stream and anti-government. The codebook
developed for this dataset followed content analyses conducted for similar studies on election
46 Toros, “The Kurdish Problem, Print Media, and Democratic Consolidation in Turkey.”
16
campaigns; the problem type variable was based on definitions used in Alihodžić47 for
varieties of electoral irregularity, including issues related to the campaing, the legal
framework, the planning and preparation of electoral activites, registration, the verification of
electoral results, training and information, voting operations and violence. These items
contain both overt and covert information on election-related problems. For example, news
related to the highest electoral authority in Turkey, Yüksek Seçim Kurulu (Higher Board of
Elections, YSK), may include detailed information on planning voting operations, receiving
and approval of the candidates, balloting operations, vote counting and the recording of votes.
News items such as this cover not only manifest information on the frequency and location of
incidents, but also important latent content on how the YSK approached these problems
which reveal its competence and potential shortcomings in the areas identified. Full details of
coding methodology and procedures, including examples, are provided in the Online
Appendix.
Prior to coding, coders each received 12 hours of training over a two-week period. In order to
ensure that training had been effective, we carried out reliability tests on the data coded
during the training sessions. Coded data were checked in two stages: In the first stage, the
coders analyzed materials (not included in the actual analysis) and applied the coding
procedure. The Krippendorff alpha value for the number of electoral problems identified was
0.58. After the coders discussed their findings, the same procedure was repeated; at this stage,
47 Alihodzic, The Guide on Factors of Election-Related Violence Internal to Electoral Processes.
17
the Krippendorff Alpha score was 0.67, which fulfils the threshold criteria for drawing
conclusions.48 The total number of news items coded was 2,174.
In coding newspaper stories, coders coded all news items on the front page of each
edition, as well as on the pages devoted to politics, domestic news, op-ed columns and
opinion pieces. Stories were included in the database if they contained reports of election
fraud or election violence. There was no minimum length for an item to be considered a news
story. If an item continued onto another page, the item and its continuation were coded as a
single story. If the news item contained more than one incident (i.e. it was coded under more
than one coding category) it was recorded as two different news items, with distinct
identification numbers.
4. Results
Before going into the results of the hypothesis tests, it is worthwhile presenting some
descriptive characteristics of the data which sketch the context for further analysis. Table 1
provides a breakdown of incidents coded according to incident and election types.
Table 1 about here
As Table 1 indicates, reports of violent electoral activities constitute 14 percent of the total
news corpus coded. The total rises to 18 percent for the 2015 Parliamentary elections and
falls to 11 percent for 2014 local elections. The other significant finding is the share of
“Planning and Preparation of Electoral Activities” category within the allegations of electoral
fraud and other forms of misconduct: nearly one third of the total corpus falls into this
category. Problems associated with the “Voting Operations” category are also noteworthy
with the share of nearly 19 percent.
48 De, “Calculating Inter-Coder Reliability in Media Content Analysis Using Krippendorff’s Alpha”; Krippendorff, “Reliability in Content Analysis: Some Common Misconceptions and Recommendations”; Krippendorff, “Reliability in Content Analysis.”
18
To test the hypotheses set out above, we created dependent variables representing
counts of fraud and violence allegations by collapsing the database by data collection day.
This procedure resulted in 119 observations. To test the relationship between party identity
and allegation type, we generated six dummy variables, each of which designates a dyadic
combination of accuser party and accused party, with allegations made by non-party actors as
the reference category. This is called a “who-did-what-to-whom” framework, where each
incident of electoral malpractice is understood as being characterized by a) a perpetrator, b) a
victim, and c) the type of malpractice.49 The coding process confirms that the vast majority of
party-initiated allegations take a dyadic form of this type. Our analysis thus compares
partisan allegations against a baseline of non-partisan news reporting. The party pairs were
entered into a Poisson regression model as independent variables, given that our dependent
variable is a count variable.50 These models provide estimates of the differential propensity of
each political party to accuse the other of the type of electoral malfeasance in question; the
coefficients can be understood as measuring the degree to which the party in question
emphasized these allegations over and above the emphasis they were accorded by non-
partisan journalists and other observers. In all models, the AKP is the governing party and the
CHP, MHP and HDP are opposition parties. Table 2 displays the regression models.
Table 2 & Figure 2 about here
The first model in Table 2 shows that with the exception of the MHP, all the political parties
made significantly more allegations of electoral fraud than did the baseline category of non-
party affiliated actors, allowing us to discount H0 that partisan actors’ accounts of electoral
misconduct and violence merely reflect objective practices. Interestingly, the governing AKP
did not shy away from accusing its opponents of fraud, despite the fact that it dominated the 49 Birch and Muchlinski, “The Dataset of Countries at Risk of Electoral Violence”; Birch, Elect. Malpract.50 Coxe, West, and Aiken, “The Analysis of Count Data: A Gentle Introduction to Poisson Regression and Its Alternatives”; Zeileis, Kleiber, and Jackman, “Regression Models for Count Data in R”; Cameron and Trivedi, “Essentials of Count Data Regression.”
19
electoral administrative machinery. According to the second model in this table, the dyads
involving the AKP and the MHP are not significant, suggesting that these parties were less
likely to accuse each other of violent acts. All the other dyads are significant, however. As
predicted by H2, the incumbent AKP was more likely than non-partisan actors to launch
allegations of violence against the CHP and especially the HDP. And as expected, the AKP
was in general more likely to use violence allegations than fraud allegations against the
opposition parties. This confirms our supposition that parties will leverage the plausibility of
wrong-doing to seek to discredit their opponents. Intriguingly, only one of the three
opposition parties (the CHP) was more likely to use fraud than violence allegations against
the governing AKP. We have also found supporting evidence for H1, which argues that
opposition parties should be expected to employ a mixed strategy of accusations of fraud and
violence together: with the exception of the MHP, all the opposition parties accused the AKP
of using both fraud and electoral violence. All in all, these results provide considerable
support for our expectation that political parties in the Turkish context should employ
discursive strategies of deligitimization in the electoral arena. In comparison to non-partisan
actors, political parties made far more allegations of both fraud and violence, with the
incumbent AKP demonstrating a preference for violence allegations and the opposition
parties employing mixed strategies.
With regard to party politics in Turkey, these findings can be interpreted in a number
of ways. When electoral wrong-doing is at issue, it seems that the AKP and the MHP prefer
strategies of attacking the CHP and the HDP, rather than attacking each other. This choice
can be understood as an electoral tactic which stems from the parties’ similar voter bases: the
coalition between these parties during the 2017 referendum provides further support for this
argument. The above findings also highlight the high number of electoral violence
accusations between the AKP and HDP. This is also in line with the general political climate
20
and discourse in Turkey where the AKP tends to blame the HDP for allying with the PKK,
and the HDP accuses the AKP of resorting to military means of solving the Kurdish
‘problem’ in Turkey. It seems that this discursive structure affects electoral practices as well.
The use of allegations of impropriety as an electoral tactic may have diverse effects
on democratic functioning in Turkey. First, tactics which repeatedly underline a restrictive
and uneven playing field for politics have the potential to consolidate existing doubts about
the quality of democracy in Turkey. Second, the mixed strategy of accusations of fraud and
violence by opposition parties may be signals of increasing authoritarian tendencies. Finally,
such allegations will also contribute to the deepening social and political polarization in the
country.51
5. Discussion
The Turkish party system has for a number of years been characterized by high levels of
polarization and mistrust, which fuel intolerance of political outgroups.52 As we have seen,
allegations of electoral wrong-doing are commonly used as a strategy to delegitimize political
opponents. Turkey is characteristic of many competitive authoritarian states in that debates
about legality are a common focus of political discourse.53 In Andreas Schedler’s terms, there
are constant meta-games at play.54 Political competition is about the rules of the game
themselves, not just about policy. Turkey thus is beginning to exhibit some of the classic
51 Akkoyunlu, “Electoral Integrity in Turkey: From Tutelary Democracy to Competitive Authoritarianism.”52 Yardımcı-Geyikçi, “Party Institutionalization and Democratic Consolidation: Turkey and Southern Europe in Comparative Perspective,” Erişen, “Tolerance and Democratization in Turkey.”53 Öniş, "Monopolising the Centre”, Ziya Öniş and Mustafa Kutlay. "Global Shifts and the Limits of the EU’s Transformative Power in the European Periphery”, Őzbudun, “Problems of Rule of Law and Horizontal Accountability in Turkey: Defective Democracy or Competitive Authoritarianism?”54 Schedler, “The Menu of Manipulation.”
21
features of competitive authoritarianism, making it an excellent case in which to probe the
hypotheses about discursive strategies set out above.
Our findings demonstrate that allegations of both electoral fraud and violence are used
more by partisan than by non-partisan actors in Turkey, supporting the view that such
accusations are electoral tactics. In as much as these tactics exaggerate and distort actual
events, as is strongly suggestion by the deviation between partisan and non-partisan reports,
we can identify this strategy as one of meta-manipulation. The governing AKP party appears
particularly partial to using violence allegations against the opposition, while the opposition
parties for the most part use mixed strategies, accusing the government of both violence and
fraud.
Allegations of impropriety can potentially be highly destabilizing in an election
campaign, sparking protests or even violent reactions following elections.55 The partisan slant
to accusations that we have uncovered here is thus concerning. It may of course be that the
opposition really was responsible for many violent events during the 2014 and 2015
elections, and that all parties did in fact commit numerous acts of electoral misconduct, such
that the allegations reported here reflect real events. Yet the objective data we have on
elections in Turkey suggest otherwise; despite flaws, Turkish elections remain largely
immune from the widespread gross irregularities suggested by the data on allegations that we
have collected. According to the detailed Electoral Integrity Project annual reports, Turkish
elections in 2014 and 2015 suffered from defects mainly in the areas of electoral legislation,
the media environment and campaign finance, all of which compromise the level playing
field that is expected to subtend democratic elections.56 In this sense Turkish elections cannot
be said to be entirely fair, but there is little evidence to suggest that they were beset by the
widespread fraud and violence suggested by the strident discourse that swirled around the 55 Hafner-Burton, Hyde, and Jablonski, “When Do Governments Resort to Election Violence?”56 Norris, Martinez i Coma, and Gromping, “The Year in Elections, 2014.”
22
polls. Accusations of electoral wrong-doing contributed to the climate of fear and distrust that
has been a feature of recent Turkish politics; and this climate represents a threat to the free
exchange of ideas characteristic of democracy.57 Thus even if they are unfounded, allegations
of impropriety can have very real impacts on democratic life.
This analysis confirms our conjecture that allegations of electoral impropriety are
employed strategically as an electoral tool to manipulate perceptions of the electoral process.
If this is true, then accusations of fraud and violence can be added to the ‘menu of
manipulation’58 that has in recent years been employed to assess elections. Preliminary
consideration of other states on the fuzzy border between democracy and non-democracy
support the view that the analytic tool of meta-manipulation might well be useful in other
contexts. In the Jamaican general election of 1967, for example, the two main political parties
went so far as to integrate allegations of violence by their rivals into their campaign posters,
which both included armored vehicles in allusion to the supposed threat posed by the other
side.59 Another example of this phenomenon is the Tanzanian island of Zanzibar, which has
for years witnessed ethnic tensions and high levels of mutual suspicion between groups.
Questionable allegations of misconduct at the time of the 2015 elections led to a decision by
the Zanzibar Election Commission to annul the results and re-hold the polls, a decision which
sparked violence and an opposition boycott.60 (EU 2015). On the face of it, the Jamaican and
Tanzanian examples are very different, but when the meta-manipulative tool of impropriety
allegations is invoked as an organizing principle, the parallels between them come into relief.
6. Conclusion
57 Öniş, “Turkey’s Two Elections”.58 Schedler, “The Menu of Manipulation.”59 Sives, Elections, Violence and the Democratic Process in Jamaica, p. 73.60 European Union, “Election Observation Mission: Republic of Tanzania.”
23
Suspicion often runs high in competitive authoritarian contexts; this means that where
electoral actors can successfully sow the seeds of doubt about their opponents’ legitimacy in
the eyes of the population, the political payoff can be large.61 The analysis of accusations of
electoral impropriety in Turkey supports this claim. It would be of benefit in future research
to examine whether the same pattern is found in other competitive authoritarian states. If this
does appear to be a common occurrence in the competitive authoritarian world, then this
analysis will have uncovered a previously neglected form of electoral manipulation – the
discursive manipulation of electoral integrity discourse.
What this paper does not explore is whether the allegations analyzed here had any
effect on voter beliefs or behavior. Another interesting extension to our research would
therefore be to assess the impact of allegations of fraud or violence on voting behavior and
voting outcomes, both in Turkey and elsewhere. It would also be instructive to assess the
extent to which the Turkish public believed the allegations they read about in the print media.
Finally, the generation of analogous data for elections other than those of 2014 and 2015 will
make a range of further comprehensive analyses possible. It will, for example, be of interest
to track patterns in the strategic use of malpractice allegations over time in order to pinpoint
the context in which each party adopted this strategy, and the context in which they decided
to employ other strategies instead. The strategic manipulation of beliefs about electoral
conduct is an understudied topic, and much work remains to be done in this sphere.
61 Beaulieu, Electoral Protest and Democracy in the Developing World; Norris, Martinez i Coma, and Gromping, “The Year in Elections, 2014.”
24
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Online Appendix
Variables
Content Element
ShortDefinition
Manifest or Latent
Measurement Level
MeasurementCategories
Newspaper Name of the newspaper which covers the news
Manifest Nominal Akit, Taraf, Birgün, Zaman, Posta, Yeniçağ, Sabah, Hurriyet, Cumhuriyet, Sözcü
Election Election type Manifest Nominal Local, ParliamentaryDate Date of the news Manifest Interval Recorded as the date of the incidentDate Code Code between -
31 to +31Manifest Interval Code of the incident date: minus levels
before the election day, plus levels after the election day
Heading Heading of the news piece
Manifest Text Heading of the news piece
Type Type of the material that the coded information is in
Manifest Nominal News, Columns
Problem Type
Types of electoral irregularities
Latent Nominal Legal Framework, Planning and Execution of Electoral Activities, Education and Training, Registration, Campaigns, Voting Day Problems, Registration of Electoral Results, Violence, Other problems
Accuser identity
Party id of the accuser
Manifest Nominal AKP, CHP, MHP, HDP, Others
Accused identity
Party id of the accused
Manifest Nominal AKP, CHP, MHP, HDP, Others
Coding example 1
CHP Ankara Metropolitan city candidate Mansur Yavaş: We have established a team of 40 observers who only traces the multiple registrations. Currently we have identified 58 thousand multiple voter registrations. For example, the same national id was registered both in Sincan and Çankaya.
(CHP Büyükşehir Belediye Başkan Adayı Mansur Yavaş: Sandık müşahitlerinden oluşan 40 kişilik bir ekip sadece mükerrer kayıtların takibini yapıyor. Şu anda tespit ettiğimiz 58 bin mükerrer kayıt var. Aynı kimlik numarası örneğin hem Sincan’da var hem de Çankaya’da.)
Content Element Measurement CategoriesNewspaper SözcüElection LocalDate 5 March 2014Date Code -25Heading Sandıkta hile korkusu [The Fear of Electoral Rigging]Type ColumnsProblem Type Planning and Execution of Electoral Activities, Sender of the Message CHPAddressee of the Message
None
Coding example 2
31
HDP Leader Demirtaş said that the assaults on the HDP buildings are quite serious events and added: “we have retained our conventional wisdom [against these incidents]. A decision of confidentiality was issued on this investigation [by the court]. Why does one hide this investigation? … all of the happened events point the AKP, not the HDP.
(Adana ve Mersin'de HDP İl Başkanlığı binalarına yönelik saldırıların çok vahim olaylar olduğunu kaydeden Demirtaş, "Biz sağduyumuzu koruduk. Dosya ile ilgili gizlilik kararı verildi. Bu soruşturma niye gizlensin ki? … olup biten her şey AKP'yi işaret ediyor, HDP'yi işaret etmiyor.)
Content Element Measurement CategoriesNewspaper BirgünElection ParliamentaryDate 22 May 2015Date Code -15Heading Demirtaş, Davutoğlu'nu yalanladı: Saldırıyı yapan DHKP-C'li değil
[Demirtaş refutes Davutoğlu: Perpetrator is not a member of DHKP-C]Type NewsProblem Type Violence Sender of the Message HDPAddressee of the Message
AKP
32