CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF TWEETS AND ENTRIES OF DISSIDENTS IN TURKEY: THE IRRESISTIBLE LURE OF VOTING
A Master’s Thesis
by TUĞÇE İNCE
Department of Political Science and Public Administration İhsan Doğramacı Bilkent University Ankara
August 2019
To My Family and Göksel
CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF TWEETS AND ENTRIES OF DISSIDENTS IN TURKEY: THE IRRESISTIBLE LURE OF VOTING
The Graduate School of Economics and Social Sciences of İhsan Doğramacı Bilkent University
by
TUĞÇE İNCE
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS IN POLITICAL SCIENCE
THE DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCE AND PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION İHSAN DOĞRAMACI BİLKENT UNIVERSITY ANKARA
August 2019
ABSTRACT
CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF TWEETS AND ENTRIES OF DISSIDENTS IN TURKEY: THE IRRESISTIBLE LURE OF VOTING
İnce, Tuğçe M.A. Department of Political Science and Public Administration Supervisor: Asst. Prof. Dr. Meral Uğur Çınar
August 2019
Turkey had 12 major political elections in last 10 years. Such intensive election environment had profound impacts on voters. Especially after the elections conducted in 2018 and 2019 many dissident voters first stated on online websites that they will abstain from political elections, and yet later on stated that they actually voted after all. In this paper, through a discourse analysis of statements of dissident voters on online platforms such as Twitter and Ekşi Sözlük, I will demonstrate what accounts for turnout among dissidents in Turkey. There are 3 main factors, which are political, social and psychological factors, revealed around the dissidents’ statements.
According to 750 online posts on Twitter and Ekşi Sözlük out of countless many, most of the dissidents went to the ballot box as a reaction to polarized political environment generated by the ruling party AKP and to say that they exist and will not yield to black propaganda. In relation with political factors, such as polarized political environment and political figures which attracted dissidents, voters cast their vote since their social circles (families and friends) influenced them to do so.
As a third factor, psychological factors brought dissidents to the ballot box by mostly awakening their feelings of remorse and gratitude. In the light of my findings it is
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important to see that in a hybrid regime like Turkey voting is not only a fundamental act of political participation but also a struggle for life for the opposition.
Keywords: Dissident, Discourse, Hybrid Regime, Social Media, Voting
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ÖZET
TÜRKİYE’DEKİ MUHALİFLERİN TWEET VE ENTRY’LERİNİN SÖYLEV ANALİZİ: OY VERMENİN KARŞI KONULAMAZ CAZİBESİ
İnce, Tuğçe Yüksek Lisans, Siyaset Bilimi ve Kamu Yönetimi Bölümü Tez Danışmanı: Dr. Öğr. Üyesi Meral Uğur Çınar
Ağustos 2019
Türkiye siyasi tarihinin son 10 yılı 12 politik seçimle şekillendi. Böylesi yoğun seçim atmosferinin seçmenler üzerindeki etkisi ise oldukça derin oldu. Özellikle
2018 ve 2019 yıllarında gerçekleştirilen seçimlerin hemen ardından birçok muhalif seçmenin artık seçimlerde oy kullanmacayacaklarını sıkça duyuyor, sosyal medyada bu kararlarına dair paylaşımlarını görüyorduk. Ancak, aynı muhalif seçmenler her yeni seçim döneminde, önceki söylemlerine rağmen, yine de sandığa gidiyor ve oy kullanıyorlardı. Bu tez çalışmasında, muhaliflerin seçim sonralarında oy vermeme yönündeki kararlarına etki eden, onları çekimser kalmaya iten faktörlerin neler olduğunu ve bu söylemlerine rağmen her yeni seçimde nelerden etkilenerek oy verdiklerini, muhaliflerin Twitter ve Ekşi Sözlük gibi sosyal medya platformlarındaki paylaşımlarının kritik analizini yaparak açıklamaya çalıştım.
Seçmenlerin oy verme eylemiyle aralarındaki bu gitgelli ilişkiye etki eden 3 ana etmen bulunmaktadır: politik, sosyal ve psikolojik etmenler. Sayısız birçok seçmen paylaşımı arasından seçtiğim 750 Twitter ve Ekşi Sözlük paylaşımına göre, seçmenlerin kararlarını etkileyen politik etmenleri polarize olmuş siyasi ortam, AKP tarafından yürütülen kara propaganda, muhalefetin ilgisini çekmeyi başarmış siyasi figürler oluştururken; sosyal etmenleri muhaliflerin sosyal çevrelerindeki insanların
(aile, arkadaş ve komşu gibi) etkisi oluşturuyor. Psikolojik etmenler ise oy vermeye
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ve oy sandığına yüklenen duygusal anlamlar dolayısıyla sandığa gitmek zorunda hisseden muhaliflerin kararlarına etki ediyor. Bunlar gösteriyor ki, Türkiye gibi bir hibrid rejimde oy vermek basit ve aslında çoğu zaman işlevsiz bir siyasi katılım yolu olmaktan çok, muhalefet için bir varoluş mücadelesidir.
Anahtar Kelimeler: Hibrid Rejim, Oy, Seçmen, Sosyal Medya, Söylev
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT ...... ii ÖZET...... iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ...... vi LIST OF FIGURES ...... vii CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION ...... 1 1. Political Environment in Turkey ...... 2 CHAPTER II: SOCIAL MEDIA AS A SOCIAL SPHERE: WHY TWITTER AND EKŞİ SÖZLÜK? ...... 11 CHAPTER III: THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK .... 18 1. Political Factors ...... 24 A. Political Atmosphere...... 25 B. Political Figures ...... 43 2. Social Factors ...... 52 3. Psychological Factors ...... 64 4. On Social Media ...... 71 CHAPTER IV: DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION ...... 76 REFERENCES ...... 84 APPENDICES ...... 92 A. DATA RELATED TO ELECTION RESULTS ...... 92 B. DATA RELATED TO CHAPTER III ...... 95
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LIST OF FIGURES
1. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Tweet (Data from Twitter) (2019) ...... 7
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CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
Dissident citizens in Turkey began to lose faith in democracy and democratic Turkey especially in recent years. The most typical example of this situation lies behind the voting processes of dissidents. Decisions of dissidents regarding electoral participation have undergone sharp changes between elections took place in last two years. Dissidents declared that they would not vote any more after each election, which resulted in defeat of the opposition and several fraud allegations each time.
However, it is interesting that such statements among dissidents were not reflected on the ballot box. Dissidents who stated that they would never vote again went to cast their vote in each and every election. What was the reason made dissidents state that they would abstain from voting at the first place? What did eventually affect and lead them to vote despite their earlier statements? What does the meaning of voting constitute for dissidents in Turkey? How is this kind of voting process among dissidents related with Turkey’s regime dynamics? I wrote this thesis to find answers to these questions, which I collected under the same question: What does account for turnout among dissidents in a hybrid regime, namely Turkey? To do so, I used the
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qualitative method of discourse analysis to examine statements of dissidents on online platforms such as Twitter and Ekşi Sözlük, two of mostly used social media websites in Turkey, since these platforms provide for people a social place to share their opinions on almost anything, including politics. Before going further in details of my findings, I want to take a picture of Turkey in order to demonstrate in what kind of a regime people live a life in Turkey and how this may affect dissidents’ electoral behavior.
1. Political Environment in Turkey
Turkey had 12 political elections in last 10 years. The list of elections is as followed:
23 June 2019 Local Elections in Istanbul1 31 March 2019 Local Elections 24 June 2018 Presidential Elections 24 June 2018 General Elections 16 April 2017 Referendum on Constitutional Change 1 November 2015 General Elections 7 June 2015 General Elections 10 August 2014 Presidential Elections 30 March 2014 Local Elections 12 June 2011 General Elections 12 September 2010 Referendum on Constitutional Change 29 March 2009 Local Elections
From local to general elections, from presidential elections to constitutional referendums Turkish people had several chances to actively participate in politics.
1 According to YSK (Supreme Election Council), 8.925.166 out of 10.570.354 voters went to the polls on 23 June 2019. Due to greatness of voter numbers and the significance of Istanbul Mayoral Election for the rest of the country, I acknowledge the 23 June Elections as another major election rather than a re-election in a particular local election. See Appendix A.
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Yet, in most of them2 nothing actually changed in favor of the opposition. All experienced by the opposition parties and their supporters was another defeat by the ruling party AKP (Justice and Development Party). There were several elections in the name of democracy for the country; still there was never development of democratic institutions as a whole. In fact, according to the Freedom House Report
2019, with score of 31 out of 100 Turkey is classified as a not-free country:
After initially passing some liberalizing reforms, the AKP government showed growing contempt for political rights and civil liberties, and its authoritarian nature has been fully consolidated since a 2016 coup attempt triggered a more dramatic crackdown on perceived opponents of the leadership. Constitutional changes adopted in 2017 concentrated power in the hands of the president, and worsening electoral conditions have made it increasingly difficult for opposition parties to challenge Erdoğan’s control.
Especially due to election processes Turkey is subject to harsh criticism both in the
Freedom House Report and OSCE Reports. From HDP (Peoples’ Democratic Party) leader Selahattin Demirtaş, who had to carry out an election campaign from the prison during the presidential elections to media that mostly propagates in favor of the ruling party AKP; HDP municipalities which are often referred to as terrorist / terrorist supporters; appointing a trustee to the allegedly corrupted CHP (Republican
People’s Party) municipalities; election campaigns conducted in an unequal and unfair environment due to the use of resources in favor of the government; the YSK's unexpected decision to count the unsealed votes on the election day; the high election threshold; the highly oppressed opposition; intransparent administration and checks and balances system, Turkey presents an unfortunate portrait concerning country’s democracy (OSCE Reports).
2 For the first time in almost 20 years, the ruling party AKP tasted severe loses in municipal elections on 31 March and 23 June 2019. Until these dates the ruling party won every election only by itself or with its ally MHP (Nationalist Movement Party).
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Nevertheless, ballot box is the spring of AKP governments’ legitimacy of democratic-or-not actions by the help of majority of votes they gain in elections.
Whatever comes as an issue to be discussed publicly, AKP points at elections they gain to justify what has been done by referring them as national will (Milli İrade).
What is in the background is that, over the years, many democratic institutions and organizations have been exploited and the entire burden of democracy has been placed on the shoulders of political elections only. This, in turn, led severe falls of the country in the ranks of democracy indexes, and that followed by the change of the regime in the country. According to the Democracy Index 2018, Turkey is the only country in Europe with a hybrid form of government. Among democracies rated out of 10, Turkey’s score is 4.37 and placed as 110th among 167 countries. The country score, which was 5.70 in 2006, decreased by 1.33 points in 13 years during
AKP period.
According to the report, Turkey with scores of 4.5, 5.0, 5.0, 5.0, and 2.35 for electoral process and pluralism, functioning of government, political participation, political culture and civil liberties respectively, is ahead only 4 rows from countries classified as authoritarian regimes (The Economist Intelligence Unit Report, 2018).
Following the flawed democracies in the list, hybrid regimes, which are positioned as third group countries, present intense political pressure on the opposition; political elections are not established in a fair and free way; corruption is widespread; rule of law and civil society is weak; judiciary is not independent and pressure and harassment on journalists are dominant. And, Turkey is one of these countries.
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The European Union targets Turkey due to similar reasons in 2018 EU-Turkey
Progress Report. In every chapter except for the one focusing on Turkey’s refugee policy, Turkey does not perform desirable developments. Especially under the state of emergency after the attempted coup in 2016, the country has experienced a sharp decrease in areas such as democracy, freedom of thought and expression, human rights and so forth. Elections are criticized intensely in the report and in international media by the fact that they fall short of international standards and do not provide equal campaign opportunities and equal representation on media for each parties
(OSCE and PACE Elections Monitoring Reports).
Reflecting on the previous EU progress reports, Işıl Türkan, in her 2012 article, criticizes press freedom in Turkey. Despite many democratization steps towards becoming a member of the EU in the first years of AKP rule, Türkan (2012) states, freedom of expression and press did not have its share in this development. “Free speech is now in a state reminiscent of the days before EU accession talks.
Journalists or academics who speak out against state institutions are subject to prosecution under aegis of loophole laws” (Fulton, 2008). According to the
Economist (Democracy Index, 2019), Turkey leads the world in jailed journalists.
The Economist says, Turkey is among the group of governments, (China, Egypt,
Eritrea and Saudi Arabia) which are “the most censorious governments follow a familiar pattern of suppressing the media and locking up dissenters” . . . “for 70% of all reporters that were imprisoned last year, mostly for infractions against the regime.
Of the 172 reporters being held in those countries, 163 were detained without charge or for offences classified as ‘anti-state’” (Economist and CPJ Reports).
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Under such circumstances, in Turkey, each election is just another indicator signifying that the country is a hybrid regime. Berk Esen and Şebnem Gümüşçü
(2016), in their work assessing Turkish democracy, states that Turkey experienced a dual regime change under the AKP government. With AKP Turkish political tutelage was replaced by the rising competitive authoritarianism. According to their findings on the analysis of 2015 elections cycles and Turkish political trends, elections in
Turkey are unfair, civil liberties suffered a systematic deterioration and that AKP is in a disproportionately advantageous position in the elections. What happens in and after the election in 2015 are the indicators that the country has become more and more authoritarian. And in fact, with several elections and nondemocratic practices that narrowing down the legal channels for the opposition in the country together shows that Turkey’s political regime is a proper example of competitive authoritarianism, and AKP institutionalizes this type of regime in the country for many years (Çalışkan, 2018).
The continuity of hybrid regimes depends on the ability of the government to defeat the opposition and the lack of interaction between the opposition and the citizens
(Ekman, 2009). Considering AKP’s domination over state apparatus and media,
AKP leaves no room for opposition to form an interactive relation with citizens and have a chance to experience political change. My findings also exemplify this situation where some dissidents voted for the opposition not because of their sympathy for the party but because they felt they had no alternative and they cry out for a political change in the country.
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Political polarization in Turkey is a fact and it harms Turkish democracy as well.
According to McCoy, Rahman and Somer (2018) polarization is “a process whereby the normal multiplicity of differences in a society increasingly align along a single dimension and people increasingly perceive and describe politics and society in terms of ‘Us’ versus ‘Them.’” This is exactly what has happened in Turkey in election periods. Especially in last elections, politicians led by the President of
Turkey and AKP Chairman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and MHP (Nationalist Movement
Party) leader Devlet Bahçeli explicitly declared that Turkey is divided between “us”
Cumhur İttifakı (People’s Alliance) and “them” Zillet İttifakı3. On 27 February 2019,
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan posts a picture on his Twitter account under his tweet stated as follows: “Turkey nowadays has two major alliances against each other.” (Bugün
Türkiye'de iki ittifak karşı karşıyadır.)
Figure 1. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s tweet (Data from Twitter) (2019)
3 Alliance of Abominations in reference to Millet İttifakı (Nation Alliance).
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Although there are numerous similar statements like this one, I believe this one summarizes all of them perfectly. The President of Turkey and his followers used quite polarizing language during election campaigns. According to them, the true owner of the country is Cumhur İttifakı, AKP and MHP alliance, and only they serve for the goodness of the country. According to Erdoğan and his supporters, others, namely Zillet İttifakı (referring Millet İttifakı, which is CHP and İYİ Parti (Good
Party) alliance) are the ones working with the terrorist organizations such as PKK and FETO. This is I believe a perfect demonstration of how Turkey is polarized by the state authorities itself. As stated by McCoy, Rahman and Somer (2018), polarization makes democracies vulnerable with declining respect for counterargument, decreasing possibility of consultation with others and intense democratic erosion, and Turkey is one the prominent examples regarding these issues. However, existence of polarization seems to be perceived differently among polarized groups in Turkey. Participants of Düzgit and Balta’s study who were
“members or supporters of the opposition parties” pointed to empirical evidence and complained about polarization as “the most critical issue for Turkey,” while pro-
AKP participants denied its existence and some of them attributed the discussion about polarization to “foreign and media provocation” (Aydın-Düzgit & Balta,
2017).
These political features of the country leave no room for dissidents in Turkey.
“Because, for the most part, a broad consensus among both the elites and the mass public to uphold democracy as the only viable system of rule is lacking, hybrid regimes tend to be either unstable, or unpredictable, or both” (Levitsky and Way,
2005) and in such a system, dissidents in Turkey question the function of their
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electoral behavior. At the end, the chance or possibility for dissidents to change the political system in Turkey is not likely as they believe, and as Adam Przeworski
(1991) states what makes a system democracy is the ‘institutionalized uncertainty.’
In a democracy, “all outcomes are in principle unknown and are open to contest among key players (e.g. who will win an electoral contest or what policies will be enacted). The only certainty is that such outcomes will be determined within the framework of pre- established democratic rules” (Menocal, Fritz and Rakner, 2008).
In other words, “the democratic process needs to be viewed as the only legitimate means to gain power and to channel/process demands” (Menocal et al., 2008). This is what Turkish democracy lacks, and that is one of the reasons of dissidents on their initial statement regarding not attending elections. Dissidents feel like their vote does not matter and will not change anything, so why should they vote?
Maybe they should not. However, as I stated earlier, they do. Dissidents in Turkey vote no matter how they think at the first place after an election. According to wide range of political scientists, hybrid regimes are to be named under different terms such as competitive authoritarianism, electoral authoritarianism, semi- authoritarianism, semi-democracy, electoral democracy, partly-free democracy, illiberal democracy, virtual democracy, soft authoritarianism, pseudo-democracy. All of these concepts intersect at the electoral component. No matter how the system or the elections is corrupt or unreliable, people with different proportions in different countries cast their votes in elections. That, I believe, makes voting more meaningful for people than it is just a common way of political participation. In our case, dissidents in Turkey cast their vote because of several factors including political, social and psychological dynamics, although they said that they would abstain from
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the elections. Therefore, this thesis reveals different peculiarities of voting behavior among dissidents in Turkey. By explaining the factors behind voting behaviors of the dissidents, this thesis attempts to solve the puzzle of why dissidents vote despite that they said they would not. This thesis fills a gap in the literature by showing that the political factors in particular, social and psychological factors play a significant role in convincing dissidents to vote despite their negative stance against voting, while other works focus only on factors which led people voting at the first place. This thesis takes a step further and contributes to the literature by scrutinizing the voting processes of dissidents in Turkey.
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CHAPTER II
SOCIAL MEDIA AS A SOCIAL SPHERE: WHY TWITTER AND
EKŞİ SÖZLÜK?
Under such an environment in the country as I reflected in previous pages, a sophisticated type of voting behavior among dissidents arose. Especially within last two years, a significant number of dissident voters began to state that they “will not vote anymore” referring prospective political elections. However, not only are there no significant decreases in the election turnouts in Turkish elections -especially after
2017-4, but also, as I will show, many dissidents who first stated on online websites that they will abstain, later on stated that they actually voted after all. Such act repeated before and after every election in this couple of years. In this thesis, I elaborated on this specific behavior among dissidents, who are generally CHP and
HDP supporters.5 In order to do that, I analyzed these voters’ tweets on Twitter and
4 See Appendix A. 5 There is no spesific number accordingly with this argument (since neither Ekşi Sözlük nor Twitter provides statistics), yet as it is seen in the data analysis part of the thesis most of the posts were shared by CHP or HDP supporters.
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entries on Ekşi Sözlük. There are two main reasons why I preferred to get my data from such platforms on social media. First, I embrace the idea that social media is a public sphere.
Twitter and Ekşi Sözlük within social media environment bring people from different backgrounds and provides for them instant and constant connection and communication. People share their thoughts, moments, lives with each other. That, I believe, is not different socializing in the concrete public spaces6. Actually, to be fair, social media nowadays is much more of a public sphere than a café, a restaurant, streets, squares, schools, work places, and so on. Public is online every time and parts of it are interacting with one another continuously (Rasmussen, 2014; see also,
Hill and Hughes, 1998; Holt, 2004; Raphael and Karpowitz, 2013; Dahlgren, 2005;
Dahlgren and Olsson, 2007; Nie and Erbring, 2000). And, thus, data is enormously large and various for my research. Second, due to environmental features of the country politics people are afraid of expressing their views on political matters especially if they are against the government. Adding to that it is already not easy for people to answer a stranger’s questions, answering questions on political matters for an interview is not likely to happen in a country where freedom of thought and expression is imprisoned. Therefore, I head for social media to seek for answers to my questions.
The internet and the social media are ubiquitous. According to Statista (2019), almost 4.4 billion people were active internet users as of April 2019, encompassing
58 percent of the global population. Twitter as a social networking and micro-
6 I will use the terms such as public space, public place and public sphere interchangeably.
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blogging service has averaged at 330 million monthly active users, while 8.6 million people in Turkey, nearly 10% of the population, use Twitter. It enables users to read and post short messages, which are called tweets. Tweets are limited to 280 characters and users are also able to share photos or short videos. Tweets can be posted publicly or to followers who are allowed by the users. Twitter is also an important communication channel for governments and heads of state - former US
President Barack Obama claimed a runaway first place in terms of Twitter followers, with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Turkey's President Recep Tayyip
Erdoğan ranking second and third, respectively.
Ekşi Sözlük with its 115,853 users is a collaborative hypertext "dictionary" based on the concept of websites built up on user contribution. Ekşi Sözlük gets 35 million monthly hits and that makes it one of the 300 most visited websites in the world
(Ekşi Sözlük, 2019). “As an online public sphere, Ekşi Sözlük is not only utilized by thousands for information sharing on various topics ranging from scientific subjects to everyday life issues, but also used as a virtual socio-political community to communicate disputed political contents and to share personal views” (Hatice Akça,
2005).
Before going further on the findings that I gathered from Twitter and Ekşi Sözlük, I will address social media in manifold aspects in terms of its relation with politics. As
I stated earlier, social media is a public sphere. According to Habermas, an ideal public sphere is a place where private people came together and discuss and consume literature, culture and politics (1962). Such discussion and consumption can be
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facilitated through the use of printed media (Baker, 1994). Analogically, Alexis de
Tocqueville states that “Only a newspaper can put the same thought at the same time before a thousand readers.” Since technology evolved significantly and revolutionized people’s lives, printed media and newspapers yield to social media presenting an instant publicity in the words of Kierkegaard. This change produces and reproduces a reciprocal relationship between social media and people’s lives.
Not only people shape social media by creating and spreading content but also social media shapes people by creating audiences whom are open to any kind of interaction out of them (Compaine and Gomery, 2000).
In a comprehensive research on Twitter as one of the dominant social media platforms, Murthy (2012) uses the term, experience of society, to explain that social media provides a societal experience by giving people a possibility for hearing the voices and thoughts of ordinary people. In this way, he claims, Twitter serves as a democratizing tool along with being a social area. As Murthy states, Twitter, which is one of the leading channels of the internet world, is one of the ways of people use to say others that “I wish to speak with you”. Such communication inevitably results in some social behaviors rooted in social media on various political issues. Arab
Spring, Occupy Movement, Gezi Park Movement are among protests sprung out of social reactions emanated from social media through a spontaneous and snowballing development, and they changed countries politics and the way people look at politics everlastingly.
Due to elements mentioned above it is needless to say the social media and internet is an important source of information for social scientists among a broad array of
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disciplines, especially for political scientists. One of them, Dimaggio (2001), claims that the Internet creates a less behavioral cost7 in creating an informed and engaged public. This information and engagement, however, does not always lead to peaceful environments. The dissemination of hate speech and extreme views, for instance, may increase with the encouragement of anonymity that the internet provides.
According to another study uses World Values Survey on East and Southeast Asia, the Internet as an alternative source of information for citizens strengthens marginal within the traditional political communication system while becoming an intermediary of civil society outside of traditional politics (Lee, 2018).
Given that it has such a strong structure; it is inevitable for the state to control the social media and internet. This control can be direct or indirect. Either way in
Turkey, social media and internet is controlled and censored. The government implements strict controls for news sources on the Internet and ensures that the news is transmitted in the desired ways (The situation of freedom of thought and expression in the country was mentioned in the first chapter). However, in countries where the state is the biggest media mogul, controls news feed and content, and manipulates them, citizens found to be politically more “ignorant and apathetic”. On the other hand, where media control is less, citizens are politically more knowledgeable and active (Leeson, 2008). The menu of actions available to cyber activists for online mobilization depends on the regime type because coercive measures used by nondemocratic governments narrow down the range of available options and make online mobilization more costly (Tkacheva, 2013). On the other side, for more democratic countries social media functions as a boost for turnout
7 By behavioral cost Dimaggio means less effort to access and spread anything.
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rates in political elections by enabling people to gather information easily (Tolbert and McNeal, 2003).
The majority of Internet users, however, reside in countries that restrict the freedom to assemble, freedom of thought and expression and right to vote.8 This swift expansion of the Internet in countries which people’s rights restricted brought about the discussion over whether new technologies meaning internet/social media has a democratizing potential or not. Some academics perceive the Internet as a nostrum for political repression (Clay, 2008; Howard, 2010). Others, to the contrary, represent the Internet as a tool capable of strengthening nondemocratic rulers
(Morozov, 2011).
Tkacheva (2013) raises the question “When and how does online activism can transform political space?” to illuminate on the issue of the relationship between the
Internet and democratization by scrutinizing the complex interaction between virtual and offline communities. According to her findings, cyber activists have a remote impact on political space since they are not likely to establish a bond with people in real life due to lack of repeated social interactions, yet they are good at spreading news and molding public opinion. However, in countries that people have strong ties with each other already and uses internet widely, dissemination of information and ties between people enables expansion of political space. That is, I believe, is the case with Turkish people, since people in Turkey are in close relations with each other socially and uses social media very effectively in terms of spreading news and forming public opinion.
8 China has the largest number of Internet users in the world by far, although large non-democratic states such as Russia, Iran, and Vietnam also have significant numbers of users.
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Social media is not only a place to ordinary citizens for sure. Since it is a public sphere, politicians also use social media platforms frequently. Hence, it is now way easier, faster and more effortless for citizens to connect with politicians through social media and vice versa. Donald Trump, the president of the United States of
America, is one the politicians using Twitter quite actively. By analyzing The
President’s tweets Gounari (2018) argues that Twitter as a public realm is normalizing racist and nationalist discourses. As she claims regime of the American country has turned into authoritarianism after Donald Trump’s elected as the president and thus Twitter is seen as the trademark of the “US style
Authoritarianism”. Twitter, in this context, functions as an instrument of discourse production, reorientation and social control of social media. From these perspectives
I also see Twitter as such an instrument and my thesis is an attempt to analyze dissidents’ discourse on the social media.
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CHAPTER III
THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK
According to Brady, Verba, and Schlozman (1994) people do not participate in politics due to three reasons: they cannot, they do not want to, or nobody asked them to. ‘They cannot’ participate because they do not have time, money, or civic skills.
‘They do not’ participate since they are not interested in politics. Finally, ‘nobody asked them to’ participate because they are isolated from the society. Voting, according to Brady et al., is mostly driven by interest. Civic skills like education also matter. In accordance with this classification, dissidents in Turkey decide not to vote since they do not want to be interested in politics any more. However, there is a highly interested voting behavior lies behind such action. Voting for these people is a loaded political act, and yet never worked for their good, therefore they lost their hope. Additionally, not being interested is a reason for abstention from politics in
Brady et al. argument, whereas it is the consequence of not being able to make use of voting behavior for dissidents in Turkey. In this sense, initial decisions of dissidents regarding abstention adds on Brady et al. classification by providing a sophisticated side of ‘not interested’ to participate in politics. For the final act of dissidents in
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Turkey, namely voting in elections, dissidents represent a complete example of that
‘they can’ participate in politics, they are forced to be ‘interested’ by several factors and thus they were ‘asked to’ vote in the elections.
Explanations of boycotting elections focus mostly on electoral factors. One strand sees electoral boycotts as sincere steps to protest the unfairness of the electoral process (Beaulieu, 2014; Bratton, 1998; Lindberg, 2006 and 2009). Furthermore, “a broad criteria identifying conditions that might be reasons to abstain: illegitimacy and unfairness” (Hanna, 2009). “Electoral considerations may do an exceptional job of explaining differences between authoritarian and non-authoritarian countries, but are weaker when it comes to explaining the variation in opposition strategy across authoritarian regimes, and within a single authoritarian country across elections”
(Buttorff and Dion, 2016). Opposition parties in such regimes consistently question the legitimacy of the elections, always object to the electoral process by the claim that the elections are manipulated, and mostly expect to lose the election. And,
“yet not all authoritarian elections are boycotted. Among authoritarian elections held between 1990 and 2008, 20% of legislative elections and 16% of presidential elections were boycotted by at least one opposition party, leaving a large number of cases where the opposition decided to participate despite the apparent electoral incentives to boycott” (Buttorff, 2011).
Moreover, the decision to participate or boycott is far from constant within authoritarian countries (Schedler, 2009; Weeks, 2013). Turkey, as a hybrid regime, also shares the same destiny. Boycotting the elections is not a widely common or even rarely action by the opposition, although they question the system. However, lately such words started to be spoken out loud. Dissidents after each and every election starting from 2017 began to articulate the possibility of boycotting/abstention/not voting. Yet, they never practiced one. Dissidents in Turkey
19
ended up at the polls, although they stated after elections that they would never vote again.
In this thesis, to understand what accounts for turnout among dissidents in Turkey, I divided the question into two pieces: “What did make people say that they will not vote again?” and “what did affect them so that they changed their minds and acted oppositely?” Although the questions are separate, answers are interlinked by the people in their tweets on Twitter and entries on Ekşi Sözlük. I used first sub-question to identify my sample group, who are the dissidents intended to stay away from elections. Second sub-question, on the other side, shows us the answer of what actually convinced people who did not want to vote. To reach out these answers, mainly in the form of tweets and entries, I searched for specific wordings on Twitter and Ekşi Sözlük platforms.
I searched for 18 relevant words and sentences on Twitter. Since people do not always use proper forms of wordings I added deformed versions as well. Out of these
18 searches I had to deal with tweets without numbers. Twitter does not provide for the actual number of the tweets between certain dates, since one particular tweet can be a continuation of another and that can be a mention to another tweet and that can go on as such. This makes it harder to count the number of results. In the file enclosed9, links of each and every wording search and topic is available. Out of 18 searches I specified 650 tweets from different people and conducted a discourse analysis on them for the purpose of my thesis.
9 See Appendix B.
20
Wording searches on Twitter between 01.01.2017 and 19.06.2019 are as follows:
-oy (vote) -seçim (election) -sandık (ballot box) -boykot (boycott) -oy kullanmayacağım (I will not vote) -oy vermiyorum (I am not going to vote) -oy verdim (I cast my vote) -oy vermeyeceğim dedim (I said that I would not vote) -yine oy verdim (I voted again) -oy verin (Vote!) -oy vermeyecektim (I was not going to vote) -oy vermicektim10 (I was not going to vote) -boykottan vazgeçtim (I gave up on boycott) -boykot edecektim (I was going to boycott) -boykot edicektim11 (I was going to boycott) -oy vermeyi düşünmüyordum (I was not thinking of voting) -oy vermeyi düşünmüyodum12 (I was not thinking of voting) -oy kullanmayacaktım (I was not going to cast my vote)
In the Ekşi Sözlük platform, I analyzed 884 pages of entries of which the total number is 8604 entries. I selected 100 entries out of these entries and analyzed them for the purpose of this work. Most of these entries, however, functions differently in regards to my questions. They show what might have affected dissidents and brought them to vote can also be because of oppression they experienced through social media. In this sense, entries on Ekşi Sözlük serve differently than tweets on Twitter.
I will comb through that later in the relevant chapter.
Topic searches on Ekşi Sözlük are as follows:
10 Deformed version 11 Deformed version 12 Deformed version
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-23 Haziran 2019 Sandığa Gitmeyecek Yazarlar (23 June 2019-Users who will not vote) -31 Mart 2019 Sandığa Gitmeyecek Yazarlar (31 March 2019- Users who will not vote) -31 Mart 2019 Sandığa Gitmeyen Yazarlar (31 March 2019- Users who did not vote) -24 Haziran 2018 Oy Kullanmıyoruz Protestosu (24 June 2018- We Protest Voting) -Sandığa Gitmiyoruz Kampanyası (Anti-vote movement) -Sandığa Gitmeyen Yazarlar ve Nedenleri (Users who did not vote and their reasons) -Sandığa Gitmeyen Kesim (Those who did not vote) -24 Haziran’da Sandığa Gitmeyecek Sözlük Yazarları (Users who will not vote on 24 June) -Mart 2019’da Sandığa Gitmeyecek Muhalif (Dissidents, who will not vote on March, 2019) -Adam gibi tıpış tıpış sandığa gideceksiniz (You will go willy-nilly to vote) -Seçimde Oy Kullanmayan İnsanın Amacı (Purpose of the person who did not vote) -Seçimlerde Oy Kullanmayan Geri Zekâlı Orospu Çocuğu (Idiot and son of a bitch user who did not vote) -Seçim Boykotu Sayesinde İstediğini Elde Etmek (Getting what is wanted thanks to boycott) -Yenilenen İstanbul Seçimini Boykot Etmek (Boycotting the rerun Istanbul election) -boykot-sine-i-millet-sivil-itaatsizlik (boycott- withdrawal from the parliament-civil disobedience) -Boykot (Boycott) -Oy Vermemek (Not voting) -Oy vermiyorum (I will not vote) -Oy Kullanmayan İnsanlar (People who do not vote) -2 Nisan 2017 Referandumda Oy Kullanmayacaklar (Those who will not vote on 2 April 2017) -Referandumu Boykot Eden Yüzde 7’lik Kesim (7%-Those who boycott the Referendum) -Oy verme (Do not vote!) -17 Haziran 2019 TKP’nin İstanbul Seçimi Kararı (17 June 2019 TKP’s verdict regarding Istanbul election) -Sandığa Gitmeyenlerin 52’sinin CHP’li olması (52% of those who do not vote are CHP supporters) -Seçimleri Boykot Etmek (Boycotting elections) -Oy Vermemek için Nedenler (Reasons not to vote) -Oy Vermemek ile Boş Oy Vermek Arasındaki Fark (Difference between not voting and invalid voting)
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-Oyumu boşa atıyorum çünkü (I will cast an invalid vote because…) -Oy kullanmayacağım (I will not cast my vote) -Oy Kullanmanın Hiçbir İşe Yaramaması (The fact that there is no good use of voting) -Oy Vermeyecek Yazarlar ve Destekledikleri Parti (Those who will not vote and the political parties they support) -Oy Vermeyecek Olmanın Dayanılmaz Hafifliği (Unbearable lightness of not casting vote) -Oy Vermeyeceklere Ufak Hatırlatmalar (Little reminders for those who will not vote) -Sandığa Gitmeyecek Yazarlara Duyuru (Notice for users who will not vote) -Seçimlerin Formalite İcabı Yapılması (Elections without choice)
Since I searched for specific words in order to see why dissidents in Turkey voted in every election despite their contrary statements, and I tried to capture the meaning of their words and sentences in a critical way, this thesis is an example of discourse analysis. To capture the factors/reasons/motives driving people vote, I examined every tweet and entry they shared on Twitter and Ekşi Sözlük under the listed wording searches and topics above. I have selected 650 tweets13 and 100 entries14 as a sample for this thesis. As a result of my examination over these data, 3 main themes appeared over the reasons of dissidents regarding my thesis questions. First, most of the dissidents who stated that they would not vote anymore after an election and still ended up at the ballot box for the next election attributed such behavior to political factors in the country. Tense and hostile political atmosphere constituted by mainly AKP and MHP politicians and the partisan media, and inclusive rhetoric used by mainly opposition candidates and opposition partisanship are components of this theme depicting why dissidents voted. Second, there are social factors such as pressure coming from family, friends and surrounding circles around people drew
13 See Appendix B. 14 See Appendix B.
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them to the ballot boxes. Third, numerous psychological factors such as inner conscience and hope played an important role in making dissidents vote.
It is important to point out that all of the factors are in fact in relation with each other. Indeed, it would be wrong and senseless to claim that these factors are solely influential over people’s decisions and actions. However, for the sake of this scientific research and in order to make the arguments in this thesis clearer and comprehensible, I focused on the commonalities of different statements. Thus, out of these commonalities 3 main themes (political, social, psychological) came to existence. In following parts, I will focus on prominent examples of statements which are representing many similar tweets and summarizing them with regards to my thesis questions.
1. Political Factors
Under this theme, major reasons convinced dissidents to vote in the elections despite their statements after previous election are analyzed in 2 parts. First part, which I will address as political atmosphere, contains dissidents who stated that they wanted to react against the unrighteous, covert and black propaganda and discriminating, polarizing and hostile political attitude and discourse by the politicians of the ruling party AKP, its ally MHP and the partisan media which is under the control of the government. Second part, named as political figures, involves politicians and political parties that had an impact on the dissidents and made them vote no matter what they stated earlier regarding not-voting.
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A. Political Atmosphere
Political atmosphere in Turkey is confined with polarization, black propaganda, hostile use of political discourse towards certain group of voters, namely opposition.
Although such atmosphere harms Turkish democracy, voter turnout in the elections does not vary substantially. In fact, what Dodson (2010) claims regarding that polarization plays an interesting role in reinforcing turnout in the elections is true for the Turkish case. Dissidents who proclaim not to vote at first and ends up at the ballot box also verify this argument. My findings reject Morris Fiorina’s (2006) ideas pointing out that polarization turns off voters and reduces electoral turnout. Instead, they withstand Anthony Downs’ (1957) rational choice theory of turnout:
“polarization energizes voters and stimulates participation.” Lawrence (2016) temporal analysis on 12 democracies over the period 1976-2011 reveals a pattern which is in line with my findings: “over-time increases in citizens’ satisfaction with democracy are associated with significant decreases in voter turnout in national elections.” Dissidents in Turkey are also highly dissatisfied with the country’s democracy; in fact, this is one of their motivations to vote. How bad the country gets dissidents seem to react against it, and polls are the last and only places for them to do so.
[1]15 Armağan Çağlayan, as a well-known TV personality and lawyer in
Turkey, tweeted on 14 March 2019:
“I was not thinking of voting. But they managed to get me to
the polls with the propaganda method they used. I will vote.”
15 Each number indicates the beginning of a new argument.
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This tweet got 17,000 likes and nearly 2,000 retweets within hours, and it shows that there are thousands of people agree on this specific statement. There are also hundreds of responses to this particular tweet most of which saying that they are sharing the same thought. The critical part of this sentence is that “…they managed to get me to the polls with the propaganda method used.” There are many tweets like this, yet as I stated earlier I here present the ones summarizing and representing the similar group of statements. Dissidents who express similar kind of thoughts voted in order to show reaction to unrighteous, covert and black propaganda which was led by the partisan media owned by the government. Dissidents wanted to stand together against the discriminating, polarizing and hostile political attıtude and discourse used by the prominent politicians like the president of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the
MHP leader Devlet Bahçeli, Minister of Internal Affairs Süleyman Soylu, Former
Mayor of Ankara Melih Gökçek and many others in AKP and MHP. So, these politicians and partisan media are “they” in Çağlayan’s tweet. And, they are the ones who “managed to get people to the polls” and increased the turnout rates.
[2] One of the responses to Çağlayan’s tweet:
“They are so low; I want to intervene.”
Here again a dissident voter expresses the “urge to intervene” because he “cannot stand the worthlessness of ‘them’”. As this tweet shows, people feel like they have to give reaction to such “worthless” attitudes and voting is the only possible way to do that. Therefore, they vote no matter what they said before.
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[3] An entry on Ekşi Sözlük:
“(see: mart 2019'da sandığa gitmeyecek muhalif/@pablo
andres)16
(See: 31 mart 2019 sandığa gitmeyecek yazarlar/@pablo
andres)17
I explained the reasons why I would not go to the polls with
two long articles above. I told you there was no good use to
cast one’s vote; I am not going to write them down again.
I want to say I have changed my mind without even hesitating
about it. Yes, I am still behind what I have said in both
writings, but we have witnessed all that rudeness, so rude, so
naughty, so hypocritical, and so disgusting. There is no direct
damage, and I am not changing my mind. But, no mercy! I feel
sick. I'm sick of your YouTube ads, your TV channels
constantly making propaganda on the ground, your lies,
slanders, and your dirty language.
You convinced me, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. I certainly would
not have voted, but you and your men have done so many
things. I don't like the party or the candidate I'm going to vote
for, but I hate you, hate you. It is enough.”
16 Reference to other posts of the user 17 Reference to other posts of the user
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In the case of Abramowitz and Stone’s work (2006) on the 2004 presidential election in the USA, the main reason for the increased turnout was “the intense polarization of the American electorate over George W. Bush.” According to writers, Americans went to the polls in order to express how they felt about Bush, who was the most polarizing presidential candidate in modern political history. Similarly, dissidents in
Turkey also went to polls in order to show their hatred towards the AKP leader and his followers. Just like Americans who either loved Bush or hated him, dissidents went to the polls to express their feelings, namely and mostly hatred, towards Recep
Tayyip Erdoğan. If it was not for him, turnout would be lower, according to dissident voters.
‘See’s given in the beginning of the entry above explains why the owner of the entry would have not gone to vote, and mainly states that he was a voter for CHP for many years and he thinks that mainly CHP with other opposition parties in general are as much degenerated and undemocratically governed as AKP. Thus, none of these parties deserves his vote no more. However, although he still thinks exactly same with his previous thoughts, he says that Erdoğan and “his men” convinced him with limitless shamelessness, impudence, shiftiness, hypocrisy and so forth. Anger seems to be mobilizing by increasing participatory intentions and factors related to participate (Weber, 2013). Thus, we can say that his vote is one of “Enough!” votes.
[4] A tweet posted before 31 March 2019-Local Elections:
“It was a fact that I was not going to vote until I saw those who
were so unfair, deceitful, full of threats, blackmails, slanders,
dirty games, insults on the nation. . . insulting people in the
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squares and saying ‘I did not say so’. Loathed. Ran out of my
patience. Therefore, I changed my decision. I voted.”
This one is particularly important tweet for its explanatory content. Dissidents changed their mind and voted since they are “browned off injustice, deceitfulness, insults (to the people), threats, blackmail, slanders, dirty games, denying what has been said on the streets”. Although, she said she would never vote again, such factors she listed made her vote at the elections. Here again we see polarization caused by
AKP and its supporters energizes dissidents and made them vote.
[5] Tweet
“With all my sincerity I say; if they did not use such a harsh
style and insult people with words like ‘Zillet’, I had promised
that as long as Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu is the party leader, I would
not have voted for CHP. They forcibly took me to the polls!
I'm guessing there are too many voters like me in this matter.”
This dissident states that he is actually against the leader of CHP, party which he normally supports and yet the reason of he decided not to vote for in the elections.
He no matter what voted in the election, because “‘they’ used a language hard to ignore” and that “forcefully” brought him to the polls.
[6] Tweets
“It is election day now. We are all upset, we are all sorry
because of the June 24th. Before, I have declared here (on
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Twitter) that I would not vote. I was wrong; we should not
hand over the rule of this country to them. Tomorrow I will
vote for İmamoğlu18. You also have to vote; this is what is
necessary. Do not give up!”
“I was never going to vote. I was so determined. The slanders
and ugliness in this election campaign were enough for me to
understand my mistake.”
Entry
On not-voting behavior:
“One of them was supposed to be me. After the referendum, I
decided not to vote for the rest of my life. I did not use it in the
last election. But the AKP's mudslinging campaign in this
election period, dirty politics had my tongue-tied. I will be
directly going to vote at 8 in the morning for Mansur Yavaş19,
and it is just because of the rage they caused.”
In this couple of tweets and an entry, we see that voters are resentful and sad over the
24 June elections and referendum results20 and therefore they would never be going to vote again. However, because they did not want to hand over the “country’s rule” to “them” and to cleanse the Augean stables voted in the elections. Voting is seen as the “necessity” in order not to give up on the homeland. What has been done and
18 CHP’s mayoral candidate for Istanbul in 31 March 2019 and 23 June 2019 political elections 19 CHP’s mayoral candidate for Ankara in 31 March 2019 political elections 20 See Appendix A.
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said on the way to elections bursts people with anger and fury, which in turn accelerates turnout rates.
[7] Tweets
“Hitting Mansur Yavaş below the belt, lies about shutting the
prayer calls up, Yeni Akit thing, other garbage media news...
Bravo you! You have consolidated the opposition wing. I was
not going vote, but I am going to vote now.”
“I was not thinking of voting. But they managed to get me to
the polls with the propaganda method used. I will vote.”
“Reverse consolidation. I am in the same situation.
Despite the deplorable administration of the CHP...”
First tweet touches upon the situation of partisan media which “lies” and create fake news. According to voter, such “rubbish” news and lies “consolidated the opposition” and made them vote in the elections. Another one demonstrates that people were “reversely consolidated” by the propaganda method used by the AKP notwithstanding CHP’s undesired administration. Not only politicians but also supporters of AKP and its media moguls contributed to the polarized environment, and this in turn affects dissidents and leads them to cast their vote.
[8] Tweets
“I was not planning to vote before there were aggressive
attacks by the government wing. They go for the jugular
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(İnsanın en hassas yerlerini kaşıyorlar.) I'm going to vote
because of many things, for example Yavaş, azan-whistling
lies. It is seriously weird though. If they had just shut up, CHP
would take away the voters from the ballot box anyway.”
“I was going to boycott the elections. Thank you AKP, you
convinced me to vote for the CHP. Again.”
“If they did not resort to the arrogant campaign language of
defamation, humiliation and insulting the opposition, a
serious part of the opposition voters would not go to the
polls and they would win the election without an effort. So
it's fortunate that some things are stumbling on their own
when the time comes :D”
“I was going to boycott this election, but they
insulted so much that I went to the polls unwillingly
because even one vote is very important. Not only me
but also my parents were going to boycott it. We all
voted at the end of the day.”
Entry
“(See: #78509627 #78549866) I had stated here in these
articles that I would not go to vote. I even swore at myself
in case I vote. But the rhetoric of the ruling party and
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threating opposition with imprisonment was the last straw
for me. I voted with a last-minute decision. If I had not, I
would definitely regret the results. It is not Kılıçdaroğlu or
the current CHP administration that made me vote, but the
AKP itself, especially Erdoğan and Süleyman Soylu.”
These series of tweets and entry show how AKP and its supporters made people vote against themselves. According to voters, if they did not speak at all, CHP would already put dissidents away just by itself. These are some of many tweets saying that
AKP created his own enemy through a hostile and polarizing discourse and it at the end served for the opposition party. People who were actually former CHP voters and stated that they would not vote for CHP for all the political mistakes the party made voted exactly for CHP candidate thanks to AKP and its repelling propaganda.
In other words, CHP candidate does not seem to win the elections, rather AKP lost it with all the effort convincing dissidents to vote against itself.
[9] Tweet
“Seriously, as an HDP supporter I was not going to vote. I was
mad at the CHP candidate. However, after this repulsive
election propaganda by Erdoğan, I would have suffered a
lifetime of remorse (vicdan azabı) if I did not vote against
them.”
Here a HDP supporter states that although he is mad at CHP candidate, he would
“feel guilty and full of remorse” unless he votes against Erdoğan’s “repulsive”
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propaganda. Such feeling evoked by the Erdoğan and his supporters made dissident people vote despite their earlier statements which would actually help Erdoğan to win without any effort.
[10] Tweets
“I also object wrongdoings. I can assure you that I am not
blindly tied to CHP or anything. I was not going to vote either
after all CHP chairman thing, however I deeply resent shabby
slanders by AKP politicians, economic conditions, financial
difficulties, president and ministers shouting out in the streets,
“tanzim kuyrukları”, increasing prices, widening income gap
between poor and rich and so on. Thus I feel like I have to take
a stand against all of these.”
These tweets advert another factor affecting the voter and forcing him to vote.
Along with economic hardship, the president and ministers shouting out in the streets with full of worthless slanders made people feel like they “have to react”. Like many similar tweets this one demonstrates again that dissidents decided not to vote since they had problems with opposition party rule, and voted anyway since they have problems with the government party rule.
[11] Tweet
“I was not going to vote, but I will vote out of spite now. I
still detest CHP, but I detest you (AKP) a lot more.”
34
Entries
On non-voting behavior:
“Those who say ‘I will not vote’ are probably the İYİ Party
and CHP supporters. I said, ‘Damn, I will not vote anymore’
in the last election, but this is what they wanted: to
intimidate and discourage. I do not love opposition parties. I
even started to swear at them at the moment I saw them on
TV. Especially I am so sick of Kılıçdaroğlu sounds like a
broken record saying the exact same things for the last 5
years. It is sixth of one and half a dozen of the other. They
are all incompetent. But because I hate other political parties
to death, I am going to vote for CHP again. I do not want to
see people on TV who grin like a Cheshire cat. At least the
results should be approximate so that others do not spout off
about that. We better be content with what we have now. So,
vote and make other people vote.”
“A while ago, I stated my opinion here [# 87027561], and
despite my friends who tried really hard to convince me, I
said my decision was final (about not voting in the
elections). Big talk!
Let put the country aside, as I see what has been done to
Mansur Yavaş and Imamoğlu it makes me want to vote so
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badly despite those dumb Kılıçdaroğlu and Armenian-fan
Canan.
Yes, I know he cannot win in Istanbul and my vote will be plus point for the clumsy Kılıçdaroğlu and (örgütçü) Canan unfortunately, I am deeply in sorrow because all of these, but still we should show our true colors.
Of course, my respect for those who will not vote due to all the happenings is endless.”
“Let me be clear; I had no intention of voting either. It was not because our vote was good-for-nothing. I decided not to vote since I did not want to provide the legitimacy that the system acquires from our votes; this legitimacy is the source of immorality in the country. When I do not vote, they will stew in their own justice. First, I got so pissed off at Sarıgül.
Then, the ugly campaign carried out by the ruling party and its allies with the love of authority (koltuk aşkı) disgusted me. Now I am going to the ballot box just to show where I stand. Do I love candidates or other political parties? No.
Am I hopeful? I am not. 7.5% of the people who voted against the Evren’s constitution were neither satisfied nor hopeful either. When the era changed, 92.5% denied their vote and claimed to be one of the 7.5% of the voters. So, I will go to the ballot box in this nonsense system, which they call democracy, so that I show where I stand.”
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People are unimaginably polarized in the country. Dissidents, who claimed not to vote and yet did so, voted most of the time just to spite and just to take a stand against the AKP and its supporters. Here voters say that they despise CHP, but they despise AKP “even more”. Their whole purpose to take sides with CHP is just to be against AKP.
[12] Tweets
An AKP supporter tweets: “You will get 52% of the votes.
You will get 24 of 39 districts in Istanbul and lose the
metropolitan. You will get 22 of 25 districts in Ankara and lose
the metropolitan. Does that make sense to you? There is a
trick, a trick.
A Dissident: “I would not vote if it was not for you
and the ones like you. There are thousands of people
like me. Thank you for your contribution to the
CHP.”
Former Ankara Mayor Melih Gökçek: “Think: On 31 March
evening ballot boxes are opened, CHP convoys in streets,
PKK flags and posters of APO waved in cars, screams of joy
at Kandil, victory parades from FETO. If these do not affect
you, vote for CHP-IP-SP-PKK-FETO-US alliance.”
37
“I was not going to vote. This nice tweet of yours
made CHP get one more vote.”
AKP's mayoral candidate in Ankara Mehmet Özhaseki: “If
the CHP wins, then the PKK and DHKP-C will say that "We
have given you support, it is now your turn". God forbid,
imagine that a militant is bringing utility bill to your house.
Think about the catastrophes that will happen to us.”
“I was not going to vote. But thanks to these
statements, AKP and MHP consolidate us as
opposition very well. CHP could have not been able
to do that for decades. I gave up on my former
decision, I am going to vote.”
Here dissidents thank an AKP politicians and supporters because they contributed to the CHP’s victory by manipulating people with unfounded allegations. One of them adds that there are thousands of people like him and he is also right about that as my research proved.
[13] Entries
On non-voting behavior:
“That was me. I was not going to vote, because I hated
opposition (not because voting is not working). Government
statements flip me out so that I decided to vote. I am going
to vote for anyone who is against them until I die.”
38
“It was me. But I have changed my mind after the certain
person’s hate speeches, curses, insults, separatism, and now
I will go to vote.
Even a donkey would be more respectable candidate for me
than him. At least a donkey only hee-haws, there is no harm
to the nation in that.”
These entry owners seem to be in the very edge of the polarization between the ruling and opposition parties. Whoever stands against “them,” meaning AKP and supporters, “even a donkey”, which is more respectable for the voter, will be the ones these voters vote for “forever”. Voting is obviously an act that people use to choose sides as if in a battlefield.
[14] Tweets
“After the Ekmeleddin fiasco, I approached Ekrem
İmamoğlu with prejudice. I did not even vote because of my
anger at Kılıçdaroğlu. But after RTE's hatred and hate
speech, I felt compelled and cast my vote.
I hope that RTE can derive necessary lessons from
this policy of polarization and discrediting others just
to be winner, and Kılıçdaroğlu can practice right
choice and right policy.”
39
While criticizing CHP’s candidate policy and indicating that this was the reason of this voter to decide not to vote, he says that the President’s language full of hatred just to win in elections made him feel “have to vote” and he thus cast his vote.
[15] Tweets
“Actually, I was not going to vote in these elections, but my
decision changed when I saw the judges and politicians who
wanted to close the files of Şule Çet and Rabia Naz. I would
vote even for the devil just to take the power from your
hands.”
“I was not going to vote. Just said “It is too hot; I cannot
bother myself with voting.” Then, Ali İsmail Korkmaz came
to my mind. I went to vote while cursing myself.”
There were statements on some social issues (such as murder cases of Şule Çet and Rabia Naz) which were bothering people due to deteriorations in the judicial and legal system. Dissidents went to the polls just to take powers from the hands of politicians who cover up such cases unlawfully. “Even evil” seems to get some dissidents’ vote versus “them”.
[16] Tweets
“I did not intend to vote in this election, but the President
convinced me with that he divided the society in two and
40
called everyone terrorist including people who were standing against the PKK and FETÖ. I vote for the CHP.”
“I did not think of voting until now, but I decided to vote after this statement, “those who are not of us are terrorists.””
“I was not going to vote. My hope was over; I do not think the votes were counted fairly. As I see what is happening, I cannot bear seeing the people who support the person who polarizes and divides people every day. We will not give them what they want. We will cast our vote.”
“Let me relax you a little, you are too tense. In fact, most of us would not vote after the June 24, but when RTE turned the elections to a referendum, we went to the ballot box due to anger he caused. So we as stone-broke sat on the gambling table. If we lose, we are still alive, and if we win, we will win a lot. Now dance.”
“Abominations (Zillet), traitor, terrorist or something ... What effect do these make?”
41
“I was not going to vote so that the chairman of CHP
would change. However, all these hate speeches will
bring me to the ballot box.”
An AKP supporter: “Chaos or Stability!”
“I was going to boycott the elections. Just because of
your attitude I will cast my vote for the National
Alliance (Millet İttifakı).”
These are some other tweets showing that the President, the AKP and its supporters convinced the dissidents to vote. Calling everyone as terrorists, polarizing people and so forth made people vote despite they said they would not vote anymore after previous elections. In all, in contrary to Fiorina’s (2006) suggestion that polarization is a myth (in the case of American politics), polarization in Turkey is real and it is what made dissidents vote in the elections.
[17] I should also mention that there are also some positively encouraging statements, rather than creating hostility, led people vote, although dissidents did not initially plan for. One particular statement affected dissidents were HDP leader Selahattin Demirtaş’s declaration telling people “harden their hearts and vote” as a favor (hatırı için) for him. Many people seem to listen to him and vote in spite of their contrary statements on voting. Here are a couple of tweets on this case:
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“Do no forget about the former HDP Chairman Selahattin
Demirtaş who stated that ‘Harden your hearts. Do not forget
about what you have been through, and yet if you concern
even a little bit about me (azıcık hatırım varsa), vote against
fascism.’ He contributed greatly to this success.”
“I, who bought a ticket to Istanbul to vote in the
elections with the last pennies in my pocket, who
does not even care about failing courses in order to
participate in every election monitoring, even I was
not going to vote in this election… unless I had read
this tweet by Selahattin Demirtaş. Imagine! (Varın
gerisini siz düşünün)”
“When Selahattin Demirtaş said that ‘if you concern even a
little bit about me (azıcık hatırım varsa)’… Who knows how
many people will vote just for him. I wish it could be
possible to measure that. I saw many voters who said ‘I was
not going to vote, but because Selo Başgan said so that I
will vote.’”
B. Political Figures
Under this theme, several models of voting behavior can be mentioned. Rational choice theory of voting behavior suggests that people vote in their best interests.
They support the candidate who will serve them the most desirable outcomes.
According to correct voting theory in line with rational choice, which was put forward by Lau and Redlawsk (1977), people vote correctly when they
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successfully match their positions regarding their world view in line with the political candidates they support. Lau and Redlawsk claim that “citizens fulfill their democratic duties if, most of the time, they vote “correctly”.” In this sense, dissidents who proclaimed to be indifferent towards voting after an election and yet voted for a specific politician whom they admit that they feel close to themselves are presenting an interesting way of correct voting. In posts in this part, you can see people who gave up on voting after an election in last two years and yet voted in spite of their statements in the next elections. These tweets among many similar ones show that dissidents acted in accordance with correct voting theory by voting for candidate they felt politically on the same page.
In the perspective of prospective voting, which I believe it does not differ substantially from rational choice theory, people vote on the basis of how a citizen thinks a candidate will perform if elected to office. According to Catellani and Alberici’s study (2012), on the other hand, voting choice of early and late deciders differentially relies on candidate traits, and late deciders mainly rely more on the incumbent candidate’s traits taking his or her past performance into consideration. Thus, late deciders suit retrospective voting theory but not prospective voting, according to writers. However, although dissidents in Turkey suit the definition of late deciders, their voting choice are not in correlation with the Catellani and Elberici’s findings. Most of the dissidents voted against the incumbent candidate and voted for the challenger candidate in Turkey, since they thought how challenger candidate would perform if elected to office.
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[1] Tweets
“Well, I was not going to vote by reason of the fact that it
would be for Kılıçdaroğlu’s love of power (Valla başta sırf
Kılıçdaroğlu’nun koltuk sevdası yüzünden oy
vermeyecektim), but I will go the ballot box just for you21.”
“As one of the electoral observers in 3 consecutive elections
prior to this one, I would not event vote in this election if
Ekrem Imamoğlu had not been candidate. This is exactly
why you cannot protect our votes, @tgmcelebi. Now should
we have a pleasure with this situation?”
“They should thank god that people voted for the
candidates. Even I was going to boycott the CHP
administration if Ekrem Imamoğlu was not in the picture.”
“May God accept, Mr. İmamoğlu! I have no doubt of your
sincerity. Your face, your heart is so pure. Your family and
your political stance made us feel that you are of very good
quality. I, as a resentful CHP supporter (küskün CHP’li) was
not thinking of voting, but thanks to you I am going to vote.”
21 Ekrem İmamoğlu, mayoral candidate for Istanbul in 2019 elections
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Entry
“I am 32 years old. It has been 10 years that I am back in
Turkey. Since then my family and I voted for CHP for it is
the biggest rival of AKP. Further, I always voted for them
even though I find CHP highly mediocre in all aspects and
Kılıçdaroğlu as the worst leader of the main opposition party
in Turkish political history.
But, not this time. I was born and raised in Kadıköy. I will
never be voting for the main opposition party. No one
should ever vote for such an ineffectual man, such
clumsiness. No one.
If I feel like I have to vote in order to reduce chance of
AKP’s razor-thin victory in the election day, then I will take
my wife and go to vote for a teeny-tiny party (abidik gubidik
bir partiye). My relationship with CHP is no longer different
than the correlation between fire brigade and hose until
Kılıçdaroğlu is gone22.
Edit: I liked Ekrem İmamoğlu's work during the election and
he deserved my vote. I will vote for Emre Kınay, the
candidate of the IYI Party in Kadıköy, because I did not find
22Mecnun is one of the poems of Neyzen Tevfik. In between the lines of this poem there is a widely used phrase “su veren itfaiyenin hortumunu sikeyim” by mostly young people in Turkey in order to express their feelings about events that they do not care and would not bother themselves to take of the situation which they might actually help. In this entry, writer refers to this phrase to make it clear that he no longer cares about CHP.
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CHP’s candidate and election work for Kadıköy
Municipality good enough.”
These tweets and an entry along with many similar others show that some dissidents voted for certain candidates who convinced them despite their earlier attitude towards voting. As many others, people were feeling resentful about CHP and its earlier political mistakes and loses in the elections. Thus, they decided to stay away from the ballot box. Nonetheless, they voted for the political candidates that they feel close to in another election.
[2] Tweet
“I said for months that the 2017 referendum is null and void,
thus I was going to boycott this election. Then, İnce23 came,
he gave us hope. I do not regret supporting him, but I regret
that I put up with an illegitimate election.”
Entry
About boycotters:
“You cannot change their decisions by swearing at them
here.
Until recently, my decision was also in the same direction. I
had cast my vote until 16 April in each and every election.
After the 16 April referendum, I decided not to vote
anymore for a system that I rejected at the first place, since I
23 Muharrem İnce, presidential candidate in 2018 elections
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never wanted to elect a potential dictator with my hands.
After 16 April, I was convinced that the elections could not
emancipate us. I was not going to vote due to ideological
reasons mostly. I always thought that the rest of the country
would not give enough support to the candidate that I would
vote for. Moreover, by taking into consideration the AKP’s
scams and its potentially high turnout I thought that RTE
would definitely win. However, at this point where we are
standing right now one particular candidate convinced me.
Although they kept it a couple of years longer than I
anticipated turning back to the parliamentary system (which
is my biggest expectation due to the fact that the high
probability of anyone with such kind of power ruling
country for so long may suffer hubris syndrome24), they
managed to give me confidence. I hope they do not betray
me and hope that they keep their words so that I would not
regret my decision.”
Here for a different political candidate Muharrem Ince for the presidency of the
Republic, a voter gives up on his former decision regarding boycotting the election due to debated legitimacy of 2017 referendum on constitutional change, and votes for him since Ince looked promising in the eyes of the voter.
24 “Hubris syndrome is associated with power, more likely to manifest itself the longer the person exercises power and the greater the power they exercise.” (Owen, 2008)
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[3] Not only a particular candidate but also partisanship affected some voters who would boycott the elections, yet did not so because of their ties to the political party (CHP) they supported for many years. Following tweets show us that dissidents who are mostly voters of CHP were unpleased by the CHP administration and former candidates in presidential elections. Therefore, they like many others stated that they would not vote any further in the elections. But, when the election day come they voted anyhow. Their common reason was their bond to the party. In fact, they see the political party they support as a “castle” that should not be abandoned to the hands of the enemy (referring AKP). This shows again that vote is not just a simple way of participating in politics in
Turkey but also a tool used in the battlefield against reactionism25.
Considering dissidents under this category voted for a specific party, party identification is an important factor to determine individuals’ vote choices.
Turkey as being a highly polarized country, including highly polarized party affiliations, such situation increases turnout in elections (Crepaz, 1990).
Dissidents who gave up on boycotting elections in order to support CHP are I believe sophisticated examples in accordance with this view. Moral’s study
(2017) also states that “high party polarization increases both politically sophisticated and unsophisticated citizens’ propensities to turn out.”
Tweets
25 Extreme Conservatism
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“If he got the data in his hands, I am sure that Muharrem
Ince would carry a fierce battle against anything. I guess you know him that well...
We all went through the same thing. We were mad…
Resentful… Yet we acknowledged that he was right
when we learnt what actually happened. He did not
sell out his party. I was definitely not going to vote in
municipal elections unless Ince took the field and
said ‘One should not get cross with the party.’ Let us
take over Istanbul first. The rest will follow.”
“I was going to boycott CHP in the local elections. I gave up though. Boycott makes it easier for people with fez to take place of good people like @kardesturkuler. I will vote for
CHP again. Castles matter. We should not lose municipalities.
Castles like Izmir are places where Atatürk’s youth
accumulates energy and people keep their hope alive.
Such municipalities should not be captured by AKP
for the sake of future. These places are the resistance
points against reactionism. Election period is not an
appropriate time for the opposition within CHP.”
“#KemalKılıçdaroğlu saved CHP from dying. He protected it.
We criticized him a lot. We even got mad at him. Yet he never gave up. Thanks you Kılıçdaroğlu for loping AKP and MHP.
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Citizens supported and certificate of election has arrived. CHP
is now 96 years old young plane tree. Now watch it getting
younger.”
“I was also mad at him at first and said that he should
resign. I was not going to vote, and yet I could not
give up on CHP.”
“I was mad at CHP for Muharrem Ince. I was not thinking
of voting in the local elections. Yet, after the assaults by
people including minister of Internal Affairs on CHP and
CHP supporters today and yesterday, I did not want to leave
my party alone out there. With our vote and support we
should look after our party, my friends.”
From this perspective, polarization seems to clarify dissidents’ choices and generate stronger party attachments. According to his analysis over cross-national and longitudinal survey data, Lupu (2015) also confirms that “polarization correlates with individual partisanship across space and time. Citizens in polarized systems also perceive their parties to be more polarized. And perceiving party polarization makes people more likely to be partisan.” Results also suggest that the role of citizens' left–right orientations within Turkish political system increases with party system polarization. “Polarization reinforces ideological voting. However, this effect is mediated by party identification and by political sophistication” (Lachat, 2008).
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2. Social Factors
In this chapter I will elaborate on the social factors affected dissidents and made them vote although they said after former election they would not vote anymore.
By social factors I mean people’s social circles including their families, friends, co-workers, neighbors who play an important role in shaping individuals’ attitude towards politics. As California School sociologists Lazerfeld and Melton assert that people establish bonds with people like themselves (1954) and especially during election periods social circles of people present more of a homogeneous outlook (Berelson, Lazerfeld, and McPhee 1954). As Gidengil (2016) put forward, there is “a strong association between parental voting and the turnout of their adult children that is independent of the effects of parental education.” In short, people, whose parents vote, also tend to vote and turnout is higher among them than those whose parents do not vote. According to Devanport’s study (2010) tracking more than one million voters from six experimental studies, there is an enduring effect of social pressure on voter turnout. As these studies show “the possibility that one’s compliance with the norm of voting could be disclosed to family, friends, or neighbors” increases voter turnout. Also, the feeling of obligation to abide social norms, as voting being one of them, affects dissidents and leads them to cast their vote.
Moreover, Fieldhouse and Cutts (2012) claim that young people’s participation is particularly sensitive to the presence of other voters in the household. According to
Sokhey and Scott’s findings over their analysis on the relationship between social environment and voting behavior, people use their social environments as informational shortcuts as which affirms their political decisions but not challenging.
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People, as scholars state, avoid sophisticated conflicts within voting process. Such conflicts and disagreements obscure voters’ decisions over candidates and timing. In this sense, what tweets I collected under this title show that dissidents in Turkey also avoid conflicts and rather vote in the elections as their social circles push them to, although at first they were not in favor of voting. Here are some examples:
Tweets
“I could not resist the parent pressure and cast my vote
again. I was not going to do so. I do not care about the
country anymore. They already sold out whatever they can.
Everything is mired in corruption. Whoever lacks of brain
and honor votes for the people doing these to the country
should worry about this crap, not me! I already live a life of
great misery.
“For the first time since I became entitled to practice my
right to vote, I was not going to vote on Sunday, because I
was surrendered to the ‘nothing will change anyway’ state
of mind. Luckily, my mother forced me to vote and I
practiced my right as an individual. I would never forgive
myself while watching all of these.”
Here we see that dissidents’ parents forced them to vote in the elections. Not only parents put pressure on dissidents but also their friends seem to hold their hands literally and brought them to vote:
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“Thanks to the person who stayed late and contended with
people to make them stay by the ballot boxes until the
counting is over. I was not going to vote in this election.
Fortunately, my friends held my hand and literally brought
me to vote. You are best of all
‘fortunately!’@ekrem_imamoglu”
“I am still mad at the CHP organization who so easily
accepted the unlawful verdict on cancelling the election. I
was going to boycott it. Yet, I guess I would not leave my
determined and faithful friends alone. My vote is not for Mr.
Ekrem; it is for my fellows who trusted him one more time.
I have made my decision. #SeloBaşkanCandır”
From the tweet below we witness another component of social pressure: neighbors. They may not play a major role, yet it is important to see how surroundings affect dissidents’ decisions:
“My neighbor, 68, seems to be involved in politics lately. I
told him that I was not going to vote. ‘We cannot lose Şişli’ he
replied. I thought of this for 2 days. It became a thorn in my
flesh. I gave up on boycott; CHP for the last time!”
For most of the cases collaborative work between parents, friends and other factors mentioned in this thesis push dissidents to change their minds at the last minute and go to vote:
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“Let me confess. I was not thinking of voting until 3 pm today.
What was my reason to vote despite the despair I am in? I got
ashamed of my father’s (65) effort, who was working as a
polling clerk. Then, my mother insisted on. Additionally, my
friends told me very patiently not to boycott.”
According to Abrams et al (2011) “people rationally vote if their informal networks of family and friends attach enough importance to voting, because voting leads to social approval and vice versa.” In accordance with this, some dissidents voted in order to gain their parents’ approval or admiration. For most of the parents of the dissidents not voting means running away from democracy, ignoring one’s responsibilities and duties, dissidents who do not want to be in a situation seen as such gave up on boycotting elections and cast their vote:
“I was not going to vote, and then my father said: ‘You are an
educated person, you are now a teacher. Are not you ashamed
of running away from democracy?’ Result: I cast my vote
#formycountry.”
Entries
On non-voting behavior:
“Until yesterday I was one of them. Then, I shared my opinion
with my father. His reaction: ‘You want change, but you want
it while doing nothing and sitting there like that. Change will
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not occur like that. You shall stand up and have your finger in
the pie for the change you want. You are given consequence
once in every 4 years, and yet you say you will not attend. The
government party behaves loosely because of people like you.
You shall do your duty and the rest is kismet. This is your
responsibility towards millions of people. You have to fulfill it.
This is also a responsibility towards your children.’ I am
convinced.
Go and vote, have your fingers in the pie (çorbada tuzunuz
olsun).”
As in combination with other factors some dissidents voted both due to the social pressure they experienced and for their sympathy for a specific candidate:
“(see: #87387794) I was determined not to vote. However, I
could not resist the family pressure. I cast my vote for Ekrem
Imamoğlu just for their sake. Only for Ekrem Imamoğlu
though. Of course, voting saved me from remorse. I did not
vote because it is a civic duty but voted for Ekrem Imamoğlu’s
stance, respectability and the campaign he ran. Otherwise, I
would never ever vote. Yes, I am a little bit confused.
Election results should not change anything though.
Kılıçdaroğlu should leave/be forced to leave with his tag tails.
We should first manage to get rid of the dictator in our party.”
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Voting is an expression of saying “We are still here.” according to the dissident’s father mentioned below. That shows how not-voting is seen by Turkish people in general. If one is not voting, then s/he is not here and obviously cannot be part of what is here which the country and country politics:
“Normally I was not going to vote. I have no hope either, but
my father’s words affected me. ‘We shall vote so they will
know that we are still here.’”
There is not always a direct intervention from the social circles of people on their voting behavior. Some dissidents are subject to social pressure and get into the mood of the election atmosphere by being imposed to their surroundings (Murray and
Matland, 2014) which is again mostly dominated with people like themselves. It is clearly visible that social pressure profoundly promotes political participation
(Gerber, 2008). People who vote and encourage others to vote, ads on billboards, social media, TVs and so forth pull dissidents into election atmosphere, and it seems to be able to make some dissidents vote. Some sees voting and such as addiction, some are influenced over slogans, some enters into the spirit of “derby”, some just does not want to be out of the “jamboree,” and some confused dissidents votes in accordance with the people around. Examples among many alike as follows:
Tweets
“I do not know why I got so easily carried away. I was not
going to vote. At this very moment, I have arrived at YSK with
a bag of votes in my lap under police escort.”
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“I was not going to vote. Then, I went 2000 kms away
to cast my vote. You shall not talk big.”
“The only thing left in this election period is that people did
not swear at boycotters yet26. I was also going to boycott the
elections, but then I got carried away with the election
atmosphere.”
“I was not thinking of voting until 2 months ago. I do not
know when I got in the mood of being a polling clerk in the
elections. Really, this election thing is addictive.”
“I was not going to vote, but people kept saying that the end
of March will bring spring. I was convinced and cast my
vote. I am now waiting for spring to come.”
“OH people, you became too much hopeful again, my friends.
Please, do not, it infects us too. There are cardiac or high blood
pressure patients here, my friends. I was not even going to
vote, what did you do to me? Follow Adil Seçim27, it will
provide the best results. Here again I lost my mind.”
“Ugh… We reached the '24 June' state of mind again. I
was supposed not to care at all… And neither was I
going to vote.”
“I guess I am going to vote for Imamoğlu on Sunday. I was
not going to vote, but now I feel like I am in the mood of
26 Actually they did. 27 An alternative channel to follow election results besides Anadolu Agency of which reliability is questioned in Turkey.
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Fenerbahçe-Galatasaray football match as the election day
approaches. I cannot be out of this jamboree; I will cast my
vote.”
“How nice was that I was not going to vote, why did you
create a tension anyway?
“I was not talking about politics, following news, and
neither was I going to vote. Yet, when I see the same people
in all billboards around, in every video on YouTube, on TV
and radio, I figured out that they were so scared. That is why
I am going to vote definitely.”
Entry
“I had written here before that I was not going to vote since
I was revolted at KK (Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu). I also wrote that
none of the CHP voters would vote either. While having a
conversation with my friend and family the other day they
told me that neither Baykal nor KK will leave because I did
not vote. It is quite right when you think about that Baykal
re-learnt to speak and took an oath in the parliamentary. Yet,
I do not feel like it, Sözlük. I am completely nonplussed.
Edit: I voted for CHP today.”
[3] Additionally, I want to point out a rather interesting example showing what dissidents experienced in the name of social pressure. On 17 June 2019, TKP
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published a declaration on internet and announced it on Twitter as well as other social media platforms. Purpose of the declaration was to suggest an alternative political attitude as they say. In order to show people that no one is obliged to agree on the unlawful and silence consensus (referring that politicians and people easily and quickly accepted the cancellation of the mayoral elections in Istanbul without founded reasons and thus left no room for dissidents to raise their voice on the issue), to be ready for dangerous developments might have arisen after the elections, and not to be part of the legitimization of reactionism in the country,
TKP pronounced that they will not go to the ballot box. This was not a call for boycott as they claim, but a rejection on participating in an unlawful election.
This decision attracted a great amount of attention from the opposition. People on
Twitter and Ekşi Sözlük reacted very harshly against this decision. Here are some tweets and entries:
Entries
“Are these people (TKP supporters) idiot? The election
results may change just because they gave up on voting,
since the difference is around the vote counts they had
before. Every purposely not-cast vote means voting for the
rival party. They are no different than the AK-trolls. Is it
even possible to be leftist in this way? Please, just think a
while.
Definition of such an act: douchiness.”
“While TKP had a huge support from people who are mostly
CHP voters who do not want to support IYIP in local
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elections… Go on. Whoever from the opposition not voting
for Ekrem İmamoğlu has either mental or moral problems or
interest in doing so. So clear!”
“Do not we know that the Supreme Electoral Council’s
verdict is unlawful? We do not know why the elections were
cancelled for, do we? Let us imagine for a while that none of
the parties but AKP participated in the elections, and thus,
Binali Yıldırım won. Do you really think that AKP or the
half of the society care about that? You cannot move
forward even a little bit unless you get to know the society
you live in. No one asks for you to be unprincipled or to sell
your honor. However, not-voting is not a way to put a fight
against anything.”
“(According to these people) their existence evolves out of
oppression. Why would they want to abolish oppression? As
a matter of fact, I think they vote secretly for AKP.
Victimhood suits their book.”
Tweets
“Why do not you just say that you take side with the
government as your acts prove so?”
“10,000 people voted for TKP. The difference between the
winning party and other parties is about 14,000 votes. There
is no general verdict on boycotting 23 June elections.
Having these in mind, not going to the ballot box and
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claiming that this is “not a boycott but a political attitude” is
a political tragedy, and it is quite obvious that who would
gain advantage of such action.”
“Political party like you should call itself çomarist28 not
communist, since you are the fifth wheel of the ruling party
by listening to them and not going to the ballot box.”
“You could just say that you support AKP, it would be more
logical.”
These are some posts among thousands of others claiming that what TKP does is actually works for AKP and that makes TKP one of AKP supporters. For the opposition voting is the only way to fight against AKP and certainly not a way to eliminate atrocity in the country. Not-voting is a “political disaster” according to the opposition. Not only TKP but also dissidents I analyzed for the sake of this paper face similar imputations. For the general opposition not-voting would only serve the AKP. Those who do not vote are just as traitors as AKP. Following entries got thousands of likes on Ekşi Sözlük. There are many similar posts, but I think these are enough to give the gist of what the opposition thinks.
[4] Entries
“People who will be boycotting the election are as much of a
traitor as who cancelled the election.”
28 Çomar (redneck in English) is a popularly used term to describe AKP suppotters by especially young and/or adult people among Turkish opposition.
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“People who voted for Ekrem Imamoğlu in the first election
and now will not be voting for him since they are in
vacation are as much inglorious and traitors as who
cancelled the election. Do not waste your vote. Whatever the
date is cut your vacation short, go and cast your vote. This
election is not just for ourselves but also for the poor
orphan’s future.”
“Those who will not be voting after this point do not want to
be ruled with democracy.”
“Boycott is treason!”
It is incontrovertibly obvious that dissidents who stated that they would not vote at first and yet voted in the elections experienced a large extent of social pressure from the opposition itself too. Thus, opposition also breeds the polarization in the country. I do not know for sure if such pressure form opposition actually affected dissidents or not, however it is hard to ignore this amount of social pressure coming from the surroundings I suppose. What such tweets and entries targeting dissidents by the opposition itself may be an example of what Patricia Funk
(2010) states: “social pressure creates incentives to vote for the purpose of being seen at the voting act.” Since some dissidents may not want to be seen as traitors or treated as such, they may feel the necessity of being seen at the voting act.
This is not something I encounter in my findings (simply because I was not looking for such a situation), yet I think there also a high probability especially with regards to oppressive political environment in the country.
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3. Psychological Factors
“The social setting in which a person lives and the psychological dispositions he or she possesses can affect turnout by shaping motivation, ability, or difficulty” says Harder (2009). That in fact is the case with some dissidents I come across through their tweets. The proportion of these reasons compared to other factors is low, however there are people gave up on boycotting the ballot box, because they are hopeful for future or felt self-reproach or felt gratitude. Here are some statements on this subject:
[1] Tweets
“I was not going to vote. Then I thought about children. In
what kind of an environment will the next generation grow?
There are other alternatives than the ballot box, however we
only have ballot box in front of us now. And I voted. I hope
everything will be better for children. #Seçim2019”
“I did not even think of voting anymore, but we still hope.”
“Yes, I was also a part of the so-called group of ‘I was not
going to vote’. Now, I feel a glow of damn hope again.”
Entry
“I did not vote in March, because no one counts my vote
anyway. I was right, but this time even I will vote for a
hope.”
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As these examples show also people are aware of the “group” of people who would not vote anymore. As others voted anyhow for different reasons, as some part of the group these dissidents also voted on the contrary to their earlier statements, because they have an emotional bond over the act of voting. It is like a duty for posterity. They pin hope and faith upon ballot box. Such emotional commitment makes them back down from their decision not to vote.
[2] Tweets
“I have been running around in every election to help and
prevent votes to get stolen. I got tired of that, this time I will
sit at home and shout ‘Show Izmir, show those results’ to
TV while cracking the seeds.
I was not going to vote either, yet I gave up on that
since I knew that I would suffer a pang of
conscience. I would get to see my high school
teachers while voting, that is something.”
“The feeling of guilty conscience combined with regret
which will come and nearly choke me at around 4.30 pm
tomorrow (election day)... I should take myself off of such
provocative emotions starting from now; otherwise boycott
will go for nothing.”
“I am not a CHP voter, until two nights ago I was not even
thinking of voting. Then, I listened to the chairman, I
listened to the voice of my conscience, and I went to vote.
No, neither the government nor the system changed, but I
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was very happy to see that the people actually woke up and
saved their city from this ‘occupation’. Stop pouring cold
water on this!
“To be honest, I was not going to vote until one month ago.
I was pretty nervous, but it seems that the feeling of guilt
will not stop bothering me. We will vote again as a family of
5. We should not lose, not after all of the hardship we had in
order to bring country to this point.”
Entry
“I am not also going to vote. I should have left voting after
the referendum, but we got carried away by Muharrem
İnce’s campaign. The election thing is now over certainly. I
will no more get into arguments with people either. Those
who could leave the country already, we have a serious
problem of brain drain. This is an idiocracy kingdom here.
Let it be (artık inceldiği yerden kopsun)! Let those who
senselessly spit at the state and the justice, who rant and
rave every day without a value of judgment go wherever
they want. We have already crossed the line at which we
could clear up the mess with little gains such as voting or
election victories in municipalities. We should not get into
any arguments over anything and should pretend to be dead
so that we grease the skids to speed up the termination
process. This is the hope in the sentence of ‘hope in reality
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is the worst of all evils.’29 Rip it off so the torture shall end
quickly.
Edit: I went to vote, people. I could not resist. Do not swear
at me.”
According to Panagoupoulus (2010), pride and shame has a considerable impact on voting behavior of people, since they either want to reinforce or perpetuate social and cultural values or they simply feel shame for violating such values and norms.
Voting is a way to feel proud or a way to avoid judgmental views of others. Thus, not voting is more than a non-performed act for some people, including dissident in
Turkey. Although they said they would not vote anymore, as the election day comes feeling of remorse also comes near. Psychological pressure along with other factors they experience forced dissidents vote. At the end, it is better for these people to feel relieved rather than regretful and remorseful.
[3] Tweets
“I was not thinking of voting either, but there is only one
way to practice my citizenship and that is voting. We should
not yield. We have to continue fighting. I will definitely
vote.”
“I was so determined that as an act of protest I was not
going to vote. Then I said, as a republican woman I should
29 “Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torment of man.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits
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use my right to vote, since Atatürk gave it to me. I cast my
vote, may it be good for my country and people.”
“Truly, I was not going to vote. However, just because they
did what they did I will be on my way to Istanbul tomorrow.
At least we would fulfill our duty; the rest is a battlefield
anyway. I do not even want to think about it.”
Entry
“That was me (not going to vote). I was occasionally
looking at the news about what was going in the country.
Partisan media going off the air while Imamoğlu’s interview
on and disregarding Mansur Yavaş’s right to defense
himself was the final straw. They provoked me just like that.
I do not care whoever wins, I seriously have no expectation.
I will be sleeping with a clear conscience that night by
knowing that I did my work right.”
Some went to vote since they are duty bound to do so despite their contrary statements. This type of voters felt indebted towards Atatürk and his legacy as they say. Voting, for dissidents, is the proof of that they did not gave up on the fight or their duty. Boycott, on the other hand, is indicated as such and would not be favored as the election day approaches. Here again, I believe, shame over not performing civic duty and social norms and values takes the stage as
Panagoupoulus states.
[4] Tweets
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“I had no faith nor hope so that I was not going to vote.
Then I said what is there to lose and I went to vote. It is
really #MartınSonuBaharOldu30”
“On one side I am a boycotter, on the other side I want to
vote for TKP (I am mad at HDP, and only communist is
TKP).”
“I was also going to boycott the elections, but I voted
for TKP (Turkish Communist Party). At least it
would give somebody moral support.”
“I was not going to vote, yet I did it again. My free will was
reflected as learned helplessness in the ballot box again in
this election, too. I am not relieved as a result of my action,
but I am hopeful for such days which can make me feel at
ease.”
“I was not thinking of voting, but we voted foolishly again
for people or parties we do not want to see. Empty headed
man we are. (I will not be dealing with it until tomorrow
morning. At least I better do that, I can do that.)”
“I just witnessed a couple of correspondences between
people. One was saying that he would not vote, another
blocked him right away, and the other was saying that he
will be deleting people who do not vote. Fellas, people do
what they want to do. Not-voting is as much of a right as
30 Catchphrase of the opposition meaning that spring finally arrived.
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voting and it is up to individual’s decision. It is not your
business.”
“I was not going to vote either, but I am going to do so
just not to be blamed over anything. Those who do not
vote are also right; let us assume that AKP lost the
election by a slight difference tomorrow and still
declared its victory, what institution or organization
will reject to that and say ‘no, you did not’? Elections
are actually just to legitimize these people’s rule.”
“For the first time, I voted involuntarily. I had no
excitement or whatsoever. Actually, I was not going to vote,
however we had to choose one of them.”
Entry
“(see: #87358709) It stuck in my gizzard (İçim elvermedi). I
went to cast my vote and did so. If my voter registration was
in Istanbul, I would go to vote again (for the repeated
elections). Still, my active participation in the voting
process does not certify my belief in the ballot box.
Unfortunately, we are obliged to do something.”
Additionally, there are dissidents who with no emotions attached also break their word on not-voting, just because they wanted to get rid of the “burden”. They have not any hope for future, faith in the results or the system, preferences over
70
any candidate not so ever. Yet, voting seems like a psychological burden for these people and they voted in order for salvation from that feeling.
4. On Social Media
All the statements among dissidents I indicated to understand why they gave up on boycotting the ballot box and voted instead were posted on the social platforms like Twitter and Ekşi Sözlük. Thousands of people felt the need to share their thoughts and came to clean about their actions. In this sense, social media provides for an intermediary to form and spread a public opinion. Not only that but also all the factors I listed broke out on social media platforms and then started to have an impact on dissidents’ decisions. In all reason we would not expect the dissidents, who states that they would not vote anymore, to go out and participate in electoral campaigns. Such an act obviously would be inconsistent with the decision of not-voting. So, if these people were not actually on the streets, they must have heard what politicians said or did through social media,
TV or their social circles. Since I elaborated on people who use Twitter and Ekşi
Sözlük, it is clear that they were exposed to political propaganda on internet or at least the news about what was happening. In this couple of paragraphs, I try to demonstrate social media’s impact on the dissidents and on the factors those affected dissidents. In this matter, social media is not a sole factor but rather an intermediary and a compilation of all the factors I listed in previous chapters.
Therefore, I did not classify social media as or among other factors influenced dissidents.
[1] Entries
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“I would not vote even if it is possible to vote with just one click on an online platform, thus I do not want to talk about getting tired of going out and voting at all. Do I have to choose the least evil among the evils? Why should I accept a system of which 51% rule over the 100% while ignoring
51% and the number of enlightened people does not exceed
10% in total?
Edit: I could not stand the defamations and manipulations on the social media and voted at 4:45 pm. I do not regret my decision so far.”
“I would have not voted, but I am going to cast my vote because of the disgusting news and unbearable lies those the
AKP’s partisan media spreads. We will not abandon
Istanbul and Kadıköy.”
“I was one of these people (who will not vote). During a metrobus trip I have met Ekrem Imamoğlu’s friend and we had a half hour talk about my decision on boycotting elections, but he could not dissuade me from my decision.
My mother, former AKP-Welfare Party supporter, begs me to go to Ankara and vote for Mansur Yavaş. I said no. I swore not to vote. But now, no matter how tied up I am I would cast my vote. After watching Turgay Güler-
Imamoğlu program and reading what the president said about Mansur Yavaş I understood that boycott is too
Pollyannaish act for this country. We are not living in
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Sweden or somewhere like that. Pull yourself together!
When you do not vote, there will be no one to ask and scrutinize your reasons. Government in this country wants to neglect your right to speak already. Only place to express your existence is the ballot box -despite all the injustice and electoral fraud-. If you undermine the ballot box, Kadıköy,
Çankaya, İzmir, which districts those we are pleased to have, will slip through our hands in 5-10 years.”
“I become so mad at the leader of the party I vote for when he presents himself as a victorious commander even though he loses the election. I said I will not vote anymore after the last presidential election. Because nothing changes.
In short, I do not think that they deserve my vote. No vote for those who do not deserve it!
Edit: I cast my vote after Erol Mütercimler said that
‘Mansur Yavaş winning in Ankara, while a fierce competition in Istanbul’. I changed my decision on boycotting elections to boycott them only in general elections until KK (Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu) is gone.”
“Actually I, as a press member, do not think of voting either, since all of the political parties are so crappy. You saw these parties only on the TV perhaps, whereas as a part of my job
I interviewed all of them during the election period. When the camera is on, they spin faster than the earth and when it
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is off they are all same and all of them are rent seeking. No one cares people. There are of course exceptions, but they are too few in number.
Edit: I cast my vote just now. I voted for whoever stands against the AKP’s candidate in my city. That party is also shitty, yet we have to vote for the least evil in order to end
AKP’s tyranny. Ekşi users also motivated me with their words like ‘go and cast your vote’, so thank you too.”
“They are a group of people exercising their democratic rights and the ones once I was belonged to.
I should first state that I will vote for the candidate of
Nation Alliance (Millet İttifakı). AKP is so aggressive that I cannot stand neutral. Social pressure also affects me for sure. I follow Imamoğlu for a couple of weeks. He is really a humble and decent man. He tolerates even A Haber reporters. There is no need to have a diffusively ideological discussion. I convinced myself to make a decision to set local elections apart from parliamentary politics. We will see if I am going to regret or not on 1 April.”
“I was not going to the ballot box, but just as I was wandering on Facebook (yes I'm still using Facebook), I saw an ad about a page with a large audience about Izmir. It was
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said that Tunç Soyer was a freemason and his photo was
shared. You see, white trolls (AK troller31) are on duty.
I'm in the ballot box on Sunday! We will not hand over
Izmir to anyone.”
As seen, all other factors are interlinked within these statements. Social media enables people to access any information with or without their consent and becomes both a combination and an enabler of all factors. Entries above consisted of words of dissidents back down from not-voting decisions they made after earlier elections, show these people are also mad at the propaganda method used in the campaigning process. They too want to stand against AKP, there are people who found one specific political candidate closer to themselves, or there are dissidents who do not want to let ‘castles’ like Kadıköy, Çankaya and so forth slip through their fingers. As many statements I pointed out earlier these too are to be affected by the political, social or psychological factors as well as most of them are shaped by the means of social media. People became aware of the statements of the politicians and the news that the partisan media reported through social media platforms. Politicians who used hostile and polarizing discourse got much of the attention to their posts on the social media. Social pressure was palpably spread over the social media channels. In short, social media as an intermediary and enabler of other 3 main factors served as a crucial determinant of the decisions of dissidents who voted despite their contrary statements posing apathetic attitude towards voting.
31 This phrase is used generally by the opposition to describe AKP supporter internet trolls. According to Cambridge Dictionary, internet troll is “someone who leaves an intentionally annoying message on the internet, in order to get attention or cause trouble.”
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CHAPTER IV
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
It was my observation on people in the social media for years that they were forming some kind of unity hoping for the best as a result of the upcoming election and they were almost isolating other dissenter views which either disagrees with them or are rather suspicious. Who gets to reflect a negative personal opinion on the election results were to be warned by others not to cause people despair. People did not basically want to see others saying that they were going to lose again in the elections. However, elections with or without the negative views were resulted in the same way as before in each and every election until 31 March 2019 in Turkey. Since the reality was very much different than the thoughts acquired before elections, some dissidents began to lose their faith and hope in elections. In time, there were many people stating that they would not vote anymore. The reasons mainly were about the mistakes that the opposition did or the collapsed and unlawfully run system. However, as the new election was approaching, some things were changing for dissidents and they were voting again and again. I wondered what was happening in between these totally
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different acts among dissidents. Thus, I wrote this thesis in order to present the answers I collected from the social media which I believe is nowadays a public sphere.
Three main themes revealed as a result of my research. Political, social and psychological factors affected dissidents who claimed not to vote again after elections. Although my observation on this specific type of voting behavior dates back to 4-5 years ago, for the sake of scientific purposes I restricted the time scale to two years. Most prominent examples and statements could clearly be seen before and after 2017 referendum on constitutional change and from then on in each election. Especially the municipal elections in 2019 were the peak point of such behavior among dissidents. In this sense, this work presents a genuine type of voting process among a group of dissidents in Turkey. What does affect this group of dissidents and make them avoid voting? And, yet what does make them vote no matter what they thought earlier about voting? What are the factors within this process? In this thesis, I tried to answer these questions.
Here I should address why elections are conducted in hybrid regimes. In hybrid regimes, elections are traditionally practiced to select and empower representatives which people vote for in a competitive election environment with a crucial difference than ‘true’ democracies: appropriate levels of freedom and fairness (Schumpeter, 1947; O’Donnell and Schmitter, 1986; Dahl, 1971;
Huntington, 1991). Prominent critics in this sense focus on that elections in non- democratic regimes “have no democratic significance…are not expression of
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rights, freedom, and the genuine competition to be found in democratic regimes”
(Wigell, 2008; Morlino, 2009; Gilbert and Mohseni, 2011; Armory and Schamis,
2005). One particular and problematic assumption in these arguments is that they are supposed to be so. In other words, most of the times the way democratic regimes practice political elections is expected from hybrid regimes. Elections are seen by democratic lenses and hybrid regimes therefore are criticized from this perspective. However, this may not be the case. Elections in hybrid regimes may and do not serve in the same way as they do in democratic regimes. Thus, it is important in our case what is the meaning of elections and/or voting in hybrid regimes. I believe that they are not practiced for the sake of democracy.
According to Morgenbesser (2014), the role of elections in hybrid regimes grounds on three main concepts. First, “legitimation is important when the authority of a leader or party is thought to be dependent upon their ‘popular’ appeal among citizens;” second, “patronage is prominent when the maintenance of power is based on the support of key groups within society, who are rewarded with goods and services in exchange for their votes;” finally, “elite management occurs when power is based on the essential support of a small group of elites, making elections an effective tool that can be wielded to maintain regime cohesion.” Obviously, there is no ‘true’ democratic attributes within these concepts. We should not expect them to be so. Hybrid regimes are labeled as such since they are neither democratic nor authoritarian as Marina Ottaway (2003) argues. Accordingly, as she puts forward, the most vital feature of such regimes is that there exists a mechanism which prevent the transfer of power through elections from the hands of incumbent leader or the party. Therefore, elections in this regard are held to imply that the regime is not fully authoritarian or fully
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democratic (Brooker, 2000). From the perspective of states in hybrid regimes, elections are not fully authoritarian or democratic either.
It is also important to see why citizens vote in hybrid regimes. According to my general overview over the literature, voting behavior theories generally ground on the reasons of citizens regarding their voting decisions. Apparently, there is a gap in the literature regarding the issue of why people perform a democratic act, namely voting, in a non-democratic system. Meaning and importance of voting rather the reasons of specific voting preferences in hybrid regimes is in need of being studied elaborately. This thesis in this sense contributes to the literature, since it provides for a deeper understanding of voting process of dissidents in
Turkey by looking at it from two major perspectives: why did dissidents want to stay away from political elections? And what at the end did lead them to vote no matter what they stated earlier? First question emphasizes on the system of the country, hybrid regime, which makes people think and question about the voting process and the practical meaning and consequences of it. Second question reveals that although dissidents are aware of the fact that the system is not run democratically, they vote in order to show that they are there. Thus, voting is the provider of political raison d’etre of dissidents in Turkey.
Instead of focusing on the meaning of voting for dissidents in hybrid regimes, I will address what people vote for. There are mainly 3 models of voting behavior studied. First, the sociological model (The School of Columbia) of voting
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behavior of which the theoretical assumptions are defined in three essential works focusing on the influences of social factors:
“The People’s Choice (Lazarsfeld, Berelson, & Gaudet, 1944), Voting (Berelson, Lazarsfeld, & McPhee, 1954) and Personal Influence (Katz & Lazarsfeld, 1955). The psychosocial model (identified as School of Michigan) which has its major reference in the work of Campbell, Converse, Miller and Stokes (1960) —The American Voter — and assumes that party identification is the main factor behind the behavior of voters. Finally, rational choice theory (also referred to as a model of economic voting or even as School of Rochester), whose landmark work is the work of Anthony Downs (1957) — An Economic Theory of Democracy — and that puts emphasis on variables such as rationality, choice, uncertainty and information” (Antunes, 2010).
From the general perspective, my classification of factors which affected dissidents in Turkey and led them to vote in the elections has similarities with these 3 models, yet my classification differs in some aspects due to the complex features of Turkish political environment. For instance, the most effective factor on dissidents’ voting process is the polarized political environment in the country. Dissidents’ reason to vote from this aspect is to react against figures that cause polarization, to show they exist, and so forth I pointed out earlier. I believe that it is not truly possible to put such an attitude in a particular model of voting behavior. For one it may be a rational act to vote in a system which makes people feel having no alternative. Since social environment has an impact on individuals’ thoughts and decisions regarding voting, it is also possible to say that sociological model is applicable to the situation. One may attribute the reason of feeling of remorse to the social pressure and analyze it as under sociological model, while I analyzed it under psychological factors. Therefore, I should clarify here that my classification is based on the final and most prominent triggers which affected dissidents’ decisions. As I stated earlier, all of the factors (and I believe, models,
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also) are in meaningful and causal relations with each other. In other words, a dissident may also be affected by the polarizing political discourse and yet decides to vote due to psychological burden of non-voting behavior. I detected such implications through the words they used in the entries or tweets through a critical discourse analysis. The significance of this paper is to be due to the difference of it from the existing studies in terms of the fact that they analyze the effects of numerous factors at point zero, while I demonstrate that these factors are as strong as they can change the decisions of people who do not think of voting.
I did not encounter a similar work while I was reviewing the literature. There might be couple of reasons for this. First, the type of voting behavior and process among a group of dissidents in Turkey is unique to Turkish socio-political context for the nonce. In this regard, what would be done in further researches to contribute to the literature can be looking for similar patterns in other hybrid regimes. Second, I used discourse analysis method by analyzing people’s posts on social media platforms like Twitter and Ekşi Sözlük and this is fairly a new phenomenon in people’s lives. Although there are many studies focusing on the relationship between social media and politics, there are not many studies analyzing discourse through posts that a certain group of people shared. I believe there is a quite big world waiting for scientists to analyze on social media and
Internet.
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What is missing in terms of scientific analysis in this work? On the one hand, social media enables people to explain and share freely what they have in mind, on the other hand, it does not provide for information about users’ socio- economic and demographic features. Therefore, it is harder to come up with an explanatory study pointing out what economic and demographic factors might have affected dissidents’ decisions and actions. For this purpose, a study using a different method such as interviewing social media users can come up with answers to those missing parts also. Consequently, there would also be a touch upon the classical models of voting behavior theories combined with social media analysis.
To summarize, after each and every election starting from 2017, dissidents in Turkey stated that they would not vote in elections any more. Losing faith in elections, questioning the legitimacy and fairness of the election processes, disapproving the
CHP’s political decisions were the main reasons behind the statements of dissidents.
Yet, in every election, they went to the polls and cast their votes despite their earlier statements. There are three main factors affected dissidents’ decisions within these processes. First, highly polarized political environment and political candidates and parties appealing on voters are political factors which led dissidents vote. Second, social factors like family, friends, and neighbors put social pressure on dissidents to cast their vote. Third, mostly feeling of remorse and being hopeful brought dissidents to the ballot box, although their initial decisions were to abstain from voting. In order to grasp the importance and meaning of voting for dissidents in Turkey, as a hybrid regime, through discourse analysis of dissidents’ posts on digital social spheres such
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as Twitter and Ekşi Sözlük, I believe this paper consequently contributes to the literature.
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APPENDICES
Appendix A
In the attachment below you can find all the information provided by YSK about the results of political elections took place in last 10 years in Turkey: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/12jJDM5nuMY8g6CwsU9pfxzyFZvmwiGAe
?usp=sharing
The results regarding political elections took place after 2017 including the time scale of my data analysis are as follows:
-23 June 2019 Local Elections in Istanbul
Number of Voters: 8.925.166
Voter Turnout: 84,51%
- Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP, JDP): 3.936.068 votes (45,00%)
- Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi (CHP, RPP): 4.742.082 votes (54,22%)
-31 March 2019 Local Elections
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Number of Voters: 44.860.777
Voter Turnout: 84.37%
- Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP, JDP):18.368.421 votes (42,55%)
Metropolitan Municipalities:15
- Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi (CHP, RPP): 12.868.053 votes (29,81%)
Metropolitan Municipalities:11 (Including İstanbul, Ankara, İzmir,
Adana, Antalya, Eskişehir. CHP won 3 biggest metropolitans of Turkey
for the first time in AKP period)
- Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi (MHP, NMP): 3.211.038 votes (7,44%)
Metropolitan Municipalities:1
- İYİ Parti (İYİP, Good Party): 3.351.438 votes (7,76%)
- Halkların Demokratik Partisi (HDP, PDP): 1.951.185 votes (4,52%)
Metropolitan Municipalities:3
-24 June 2018 General Elections
Number of Voters: 49.664.165
Voter Turnout: 88,18%
- Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP, JDP): 20.559.732 votes (42,28%)
- Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi: 11.086.897 votes (22,80%)
- Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi: 5.444.728 votes (11,20%)
- İYİ Parti: 4.932.510 votes (10,14%)
- Halkların Demokratik Partisi: 5.606.622 votes (11,53%)
-24 June 2018 Presidential Elections
Number of Voters: 51.197.959
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Voter Turnout: 86,24%
- Recep Tayyip Erdoğan: 26.330.823 votes
- Muharrem İnce: 15.340.321 votes
- Meral Akşener: 3.649.030 votes
- Selahattin Demirtaş: 4.205.794 votes
-16 April 2017 Referendum on Constitutional Change
Number of Voters: 48.374.576
Voter Turnout: 87,45%
- Evet (Yes): 24.325.633 votes (51.41%)
- Hayır (No): 23.203.316 votes (48.59%)
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Appendix B
Because the data set is large, I enclosed it, including website links of relevant Twitter searches, Tweets, relevant Ekşi Sözlük searches and Entries, and screenshots of each and every Tweet and Entry that I analyzed in this thesis, in the attachment following: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/12Hz1aZsnxA4FlFUGAeIkr_kqFdP5dhWt?us p=sharing
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