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Manipulation of Vote Choice – Impediment to the Electoral Integrity in Turkey?1

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Manipulation of Vote Choice – Impediment to the Electoral Integrity in Turkey?1 DOI : 10.14746/pp.2017.22.3.8 Adam SZYMAŃSKI University of Warsaw Jakub WÓDKA Polish Academy of Science Manipulation of Vote Choice – Impediment to the Electoral Integrity in Turkey?1 Abstract: Turkey has had a fairly long tradition of regular, competitive polls and multi-party democ- racy begun in 1946. However, in the last decade, with the consolidation of Justice and Development Party’s (AKP, Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi) grip on power, there has been a growing concern about the integrity of elections in this state. In subsequent elections the ruling party resorted to a plethora of means inhibiting their competitiveness. Thus, the article seeks to survey the extent of election mal- practices in Turkey with the focus on manipulation of vote choice as most disturbing group of electoral malpractices and, without prejudging, to address the fundamental questions about whether elections in Turkey, notwithstanding the irregularities, still meet democratic, international standards, or whether Turkey is sliding into electoral autocracy. Key words: elections, electoral malpractice, democratisation, Turkey, Justice and Development Party urkey has had a fairly long tradition of competitive polls and multi-party democracy Tbegun in 1946, with the then decision to hold “regular […] free and fair elections, a major turning point in Turkey’s recent political history” (Sayarı, 2012, p. 183). Some students of modern Turkey claim that the 1950 elections were a “more important divide in Turkish political history than the more commonly recognized official demise of the Ottoman Empire and declaration of the Turkish Republic in 1923…usher[ing] in a new political era” (Tachau, 2000, p. 130). Ever since, altogether 19 parliamentary ballots have been held, as well as numerous local elections. As a result of a 2007 nation-wide referendum and an amendment intro- duced to the Turkish constitution, the presidential elections in August 2014 were the first direct ballot of the president of the Republic of Turkey by popular vote, hitherto elected indirectly through a parliamentary nomination. Indeed, in the last decades, Turkey has been a country where ruling parties – the in- cumbents have been losing elections, ceding power to opposition political forces – a fun- damental attribute of a democratic system, according to the classical definition of Adam Przeworski (Przeworski 1991, p. 10). Suffice to say that in the post-war era, alternation in power and government turnover has taken place through elections, with no single par- ty in Turkey staying in power (either in a single party government or in a coalition cabi- 1 This article is a result of the preliminary research within the project “Between Fair and Rigged. Elections as a Key Determinant of the ‘Borderline Political Regime’ – Turkey in Comparative Perspec- tive”, carried out in 2017–2018 at the Faculty of Political Science and International Studies, University of Warsaw and financed by the Polish National Science Centre within the funding programme “OPUS 11”. 104 Adam SZYMAŃSKI, Jakub WÓDKA PP 3 ’17 net) for more than 10 years. Naturally, Turkey’s democratic trajectory has been upset by military interventions, direct or indirect, yet, in times of civilian rule, there was a genuine competition between political parties, with the elections as the only means of acceding to political power and their fairness never seriously questioned (Erisen, Kubicek, 2016).2 Notwithstanding the fact that Turkey has been holding elections which genuinely reflect the popular will, in the last decade, with the consolidation of AKP’s grip on power there has been a growing concern about the integrity of the electoral process whose deficits supplement the long list of the current Turkish problems in the democratization process. It is not that the AKP does not enjoy public support; it does, and probably – as the public opinion shows – even without the election swindles, it would garner the larg- est number of votes. Yet, tinkering with ballots, we believe, contributed substantially to AKP hitting the jackpot in subsequent elections, which leads to an ever increasing domination of the AKP in the Turkish political system. The existing scholarship on Turkish elections (for example by Ali Çarkoğlu; Kerem Yıldırım; Sabrı Sayarı) (Çarkoğlu, Yıldırım, 2015, pp. 57–79; Sayarı, 2016, pp. 263–280) concentrates rather on the traditional description of the elections, their results and po- litical ramifications, implications for the inter-party rivalry and cultural or sociological aspects.3 Thus, the article seeks to fill this gap and survey the election malpractices in Turkey and, without prejudging, to address a fundamental question about whether elec- tions in Turkey, notwithstanding the irregularities, still meet democratic, international standards, or whether Turkey is sliding into electoral autocracy. The goal is to investi- gate the phenomenon of “electoral malpractice” understood as the violation of electoral integrity, which means the violation of internationally accepted standards of elections throughout the whole electoral cycle. There is a difference between the notion of “mal- practice” and “mispractice” – the flaws in elections that are not deliberate, but resulting from an unintentional error or other impediments. Flaws in one of the phases of the elec- toral cycle mean that the elections have been flawed. It is particularly important in the case of Turkey because the observation of elections in this state leads to the conclusion that most problematic in the context of electoral integrity are not manipulations of the voting act but malpractices concerning voter’s choice. The article is aimed at confirming this observation through a thorough analysis of different types of manipulation of vote choice in Turkey. It will help us to answer the question about their impact on the electoral integrity in this state. We vet primarily the March 2014 local elections and August 2014 presidential elec- tions, as well as the June and November 2015 general parliamentary elections, as our aim is to catalogue AKP’s electoral stratagems as comprehensively as possible. For the sake of objectivity, we put our analysis in a broader historical context, as Turkey has a legacy of undemocratic electoral institutions, with the 10 percent election threshold as only one example of the designs, inherited by AKP (and unsurprisingly unaltered by the ruling party), which have distorted the broadly understood fairness of political competition. 2 For a more cautious and skeptical assessment of the fairness of the elections in Turkey in the last 50 years, see: Sayarı, 2002; Sütçü, 2011, pp. 341–356. 3 There are only a few exceptions of articles concerning electoral integrity as the main research topic, e.g. Aygül, 2015, pp. 181–201. Most of them have not been even published yet. See e.g. Akkoy- unlu, 2017, forthcoming. PP 3 ’17 Manipulation of Vote Choice – Impediment to the Electoral... 105 To begin with, we offer a snapshot on our understanding of electoral malpractices, underpinning the analysis. Next, the empirical part follows, with a detailed scrutiny on the manipulations of vote choice. Finally, in the closing section, we synthesize the find- ings and draw generalisable conclusions. Theoretical Framework of Electoral Malpractice At the beginning of the 21st century we can observe an increasing number of states in which elections are held but which do not meet standards of liberal democracy. This has led to the proliferation of theoretical studies, published e.g. by Andreas Schedler as well as Sarah Birch, Pippa Norris and Alberto Simpser (Birch, 2011; Schedler, 2002; 2006; 2013; Norris, 2014; 2015; Simpser, 2013), who focus on the issue of the elec- toral integrity vs. electoral malpractice, including their conceptualization, indicators and typologies. What is particularly interesting from the point of view of science political is the case of the extensive use of different types of measures (legal, procedural and administrative instruments, financial resources, communication tools, first of all media and other measures influencing the voters) by the most influential political forces, usu- ally the incumbent to distort the level playing field between the parties and to enable the forces holding power to keep it for the next legislative period. In electoral autocracies or other regimes of this kind, electoral laws, as well as the procedures favour the ruling party, giving it a leverage over rivalling parties; there are limitations on voter and party registration; the dominant party is also favoured as far as the electoral campaign and the financial resources are concerned; there are irregularities in the voting process, including the counting of votes; and the electoral officials lack impartiality and independence. The use of these measures in turn leads to the domination of certain political forces within the party and political system in a long-term perspective. Researchers of electoral studies have come up with different taxonomies and cat- egorizations of electoral malpractices, which merit a brief review. Norris, in her broad- ranged Electoral Integrity Project, on the basis of expert surveys, gauges the legitimacy of elections across 11 categories reflecting all stages of the electoral cycle: pre-election, campaign, polling day, and its aftermath.4 Schedler, on his part, presents the “chain of democratic choice”, comprising seven “links” which, for the elections to be “democrat- ic”, have to remain unbroken – “no links to be added, none to
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