Effects of Political Violence on Incumbent Political Parties
Reşat Bayer, Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey, +90-212-3381551, [email protected]
Özge Kemahlıoğlu, Sabanci University, Istanbul, Turkey,+90-216-4839268 [email protected]
Zübeyde Ece Kural, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden, [email protected]
Abstract
While the large-N literature has paid some attention to the relationship between electoral politics and terrorism with a focus on whether terrorism affects left-wing or right-wing parties, we argue, that the role of incumbency is overlooked. We maintain that through local state resources and party machinery the national incumbent party is able to overcome criticisms that breaches to security happened on its watch. We conduct separate analyses on the 1993 and 1997 general elections from Chile and five general elections between
1995 and 2011 in Turkey. These two countries are not only historically among the most terror-affected countries of the world and have a checkered history with democracy (Weinberg 2013) but they also enable us to compare the effects of urban ideological terrorism in the case of Chile with that from Turkey which includes rural guerrilla warfare and has an ethnic dimension, and also affected civilians as well as non- civilians. We combine data from the Global Terrorism Database with electoral politics data. Our choice of countries enables us to examine left-wing incumbents, right-wing incumbents, single party and coalition incumbent governments. Unlike much of the relevant literature, our statistical analysis is conducted at the municipal level, where we argue that the effects of terrorism are most likely to be felt given the proximity to the attack. The results demonstrate the importance of considering the municipal level electoral linkages as well as the local party organizations more in the study of political violence as strong local organizations present incumbent parties the opportunity to avoid blame for their failure to provide security to citizens.
1
Introduction
The 2004 Madrid bombings are portrayed as having played a major role in the electoral loss of the incumbent right-wing political party in Spain. On the other hand the incumbent right-wing political party or parties appear to gain from terrorist attacks in Israel. This creates several questions: Given that most studies linking electoral politics with terrorism are based on Israel and Spain: is the finding for Israel or Spain more pertinent for other parts of the world? While the focus has mainly been on the fate of right-wing incumbent parties, what about left-wing parties? Moreover, if terrorist attacks do not affect the incumbent political parties, how can this situation be explained? Finally, given that different parts of the same province (let alone country) experience terrorism at a different level, how does this translate to voting behavior in different corners of the same province?
In this paper we argue that some of the answers lie in the electoral accountability process in democratic regimes and the role that political parties play in it. Political parties are crucial for the study of terrorism. The intricate ties between terrorist groups and political parties such as the role of political parties in terrorist group formation as well as in terrorist groups' decision to participate in elections and their relations to their political branches (Braithwaite, 2013; de La Calle and Sánchez-Cuenca, 2013) have been shown previously. Since terrorist organizations have aims that they are trying to achieve through violence, political parties become paramount because in a modern democracy, the demands of a group using terrorism, can only be addressed by the political parties, in particular the incumbent political party. Moreover, political parties give terrorist organizations legitimacy by accepting to have talks with them, conveying the messages of terrorists to a wider audience, and by helping with their recruitment through their reactions. Finally, one way in which the broader society can show its approval of political parties during periods of terrorism is through elections. Thus, this linkage of terrorism, 2 elections, and political parties has multiple implications for the study of terrorism, electoral politics and more broadly to modern democracy.
We delve further into the role that political parties and party machines play in the mechanisms of electoral accountability for terrorist activities. Our theoretical contribution lies in our focus on the mediating effect of party machines that are built with local state resources. We argue that national incumbent parties have control over state resources that can be transferred to partisans at the local level, which can be used to build effective party machines. These machines are, then, used to the advantage of incumbent parties in offsetting the negative effects of terrorist attacks and the consequent perception of loss of security among voters. Therefore, we argue that incumbents might avoid blame and punishment with the help of the party machines that they build using local state resources.
Empirically we analyze municipal level legislative election results to see how terrorism affects incumbent parties in elections. We conduct the empirical analysis at the municipal level where the citizens would feel more threatened by the attacks since they are closer to the location of the attack. This is also the level where party machines, which our theory expects to be critical for mechanisms of electoral accountability, are typically built.
We carry out our empirical analysis in two countries, Chile and Turkey, which are listed among the two countries with the greatest amount of terrorist incidents historically.
Moreover, both of their democracies during the years under consideration had problems with their democracy (Weinberg 2013). At the same time, they serve as two opposing contexts with respect to the question of how terrorist attacks would affect the incumbent parties’ performance in the national elections. While the terrorist activities mostly consisted of radical leftist attacks in urban areas in Chile, political violence in Turkey also included ethnically based mobilization in rural areas. 3
In addition to the type of terrorism, the electoral context is also different in the periods of analyses across these countries. In the post-transition period of Chile the most destructive and frequent terrorist attacks occurred right after the transition before political parties had an opportunity to consolidate their power locally. In contrast, especially the pre-2015 elections in Turkey saw an incumbent party that has turned itself into a predominant party through an effective party organization. While there has been interest in how the electoral system (Piazza 2010, Foster, Braithwaite, and Sobek, 2013), e.g., majoritarian or proportional, might affect terrorism, our results focus here on political parties. At the same time, it is important to note that one of our cases is a presidential system whereas the other would be classified as parliamentary throughout this period.
In a more straightforward way, the choice of these two different cases helps us to assess whether our theory is applicable in more than one region of the world.
Comparisons between Turkey and Latin American countries have taken place in the past both in terms of violence (Eccarius-Kelly 2012) as well as electoral politics (Kemahlioglu
2012). The current study of electoral politics and terrorism in Latin America in the large-N literature seems to be mainly limited to the study of Colombia (Holmes & Gutiérrez de
Piñeres 2012) even though much of Latin America such as Uruguay, Peru, and Argentina have their own experiences with terrorism. The case of Chile is particularly relevant here as most current studies on electoral violence and terrorism focus on politically violent non-state actors that are mainly using (rural) guerrilla warfare. This is problematic and can even be considered as conceptual stretching as deaths that emerge from guerrilla warfare and terrorism are lumped together despite the differences between them (Sánchez-
Cuenca and de la Calle 2009). While we recognize that non-state actors can use guerrilla and terrorist tactics, we believe that the literature is presenting the findings as if they were entirely of terrorist nature when they tend to include behavior that would be closer to 4 guerrilla warfare. This has policy implications. Moreover, besides the political violence in
Turkey which is associated with PKK, there are other terrorist groups in Turkey and by separating the attacks from PKK with others, the effects of both sorts of violence can be seen. In addition, Chile offers us the possibility of studying the fate of left-wing incumbent political parties, which is missing in the literature. This omission is highly problematic as the literature also shows that terrorist groups are found more where many left-wing parties are present and winning votes (Weinberg and Eubank 1992). Moreover, the
September bombings of 2014 in Chile have once again brought its history with terrorism into the spotlight and serve as a reminder of the terrorism of the early 1990s1, which had raised concerns about the future of stability and democracy (Long 1991). By analyzing terrorism in Turkey and Chile particularly in early 1990s, we are also able to contribute to the understanding of the impact of terrorism during a vulnerable stage of democratization- an issue which is of growing relevance as there is fear in several corners of the world of the impact of terror on the fate of democracy and elections. In the case of Turkey, it is noteworthy that for a country that has a long history with terrorism, there is a dearth of studies on terrorism and electoral politics. In addition, while Turkey is mainly thought of in relations to terrorism emerging from the Kurdish question (Satana, 2011), the January
2015 bombings in Istanbul as well as the Synagogue and HSBC Bank bombings of 2003 were not the activities of Kurdish groups, which demonstrates the variety of groups that relied upon terrorist activities in Turkey making it a particularly useful location for testing the effects of terrorism. Finally, while, there are often suggestions in the pro-government media that terrorist groups want to see the incumbent political party lose elections (Zaman,
2008a), we do not know whether AK Parti (incumbent party) has indeed been affected.
1Interview with Marcelo Schilling who headed Consejo Coordinador de Seguridad Pública in early 1990s. http://diario.latercera.com/2014/09/21/01/contenido/reportajes/251735659marceloschillingnohaynadamasin mundoquelaluchaclandestina.shtml 5
In the rest of the paper, we first present the literature review. We then discuss our main theoretical contribution that highlights the role of local party organizations and incumbency in the process of electoral accountability for terrorism. We also give information about the nature of the party system and terrorist activities in the two countries of analysis. We continue by presenting our findings from a regression analysis of the 1993 and 1997 elections in Chile and five elections from 1995 until 2011 in Turkey.
Literature review on Electoral Effects of Terrorism
While there is growing interest on how political parties fare as a result of terrorism, we believe the issue of incumbency has not received due attention in the literature. Yet, this is rather critical as we can find examples such as Israel and Spain which would support both theses on whether incumbents are blamed for terrorism or receive public support. More worrisome is the lack of a theoretical argument on the relationship between terrorism and incumbency.
The literature shows that terrorism affects electoral politics in democracies
(Berrebi and Klor, 2008; Kıbrıs, 2011; Montalvo, 2011; Holmes & Gutiérrez de Piñeres
2012; Robbins, Hunter and Murray, 2013; for recent studies on non-democracies see
Newman, 2013; Aksoy, Carter, and Wright, 2012). Some studies maintain that right-wing incumbent parties receive more votes following terrorism (Berrebi and Klor, 2006; Berrebi and Klor, 2008; Kıbrıs, 2011). This would also tie with Onreat, van Hiel, and Cornelis's
(2013) finding that in the face of threats there is a turn to right-wing attitudes. Specifically, in the case of Israeli elections, a right-wing incumbent prime minister's party encountering local fatalities due to terrorism does not witness lessened votes and that the vote for the right is not due to turnout but due to change of preferences (Berrebi and Klor, 2008;
Getmansky and Zeitzoff 2014). Contrast that with the Spanish 2004 national elections where survey results show that terrorism contributed to the victory of the Socialist Party 6 over the incumbent Popular Party; specifically the terrorist attack in Madrid seem to have particularly influenced young and uneducated as well as the center and left leaning individuals to vote (Bali, 2007). Not only was the fate of the incumbents different but unlike in Israel, it would appear that turnout was consequential in Spain. In fact, Montalvo
(2011) using overseas ballots cast before the elections estimates that the ruling right-wing party could have won between 42 and 46 per cent of the vote rather than 37.6 per cent of the vote had it not been for the Madrid bombings. Somewhat similarly, in the case of three
Colombian presidential elections (Holmes & Gutiérrez de Piñeres, 2012), the right-wing incumbent political parties lost support in the face of leftist human rights violations (which is broadly defined to include terrorism) and to a lesser degree gained support from paramilitary violations but it is not possible to say whether the different incumbents equally gained or lost as all elections are analyzed together. While the Israeli case would suggest that the right-wing appears to see its votes increase in the face of terrorism, the
Spanish case suggests that this support is conditional on public approval of relevant policy areas: Specifically, the right-wing political party's vulnerability in relevant policy areas to the terrorist attack such as foreign policy was highlighted by terrorism (Bali, 2007).
Moreover, there are some interesting findings reported for left-wing parties. The amount of terrorist attacks is found to be higher when a left-leaning party is in office in
Israel (Berberi and Klor, 2006). In fact, right-wing incumbent parties do not appear at a marked advantage over their left-wing parties in receiving (verbal) support from opposition political parties in the face of terrorist attacks (Chowanietz, 2010). This finding is also collaborated by Koch and Cranmer (2007) and Williams, Koch, and Smith (2013), which respectively demonstrate that left-wing governments attract more transnational terrorism and that left-wing governments are less likely to survive transnational terrorist attacks. In addition, Alonson (2013) points out that negotiations with ETA negatively affected the ensuing left-wing goverment that came to power after the Madrid bombings 7 and, thus, terrorism affected first a right-wing then a left-wing government in elections.
In fact, Echebarria-Echabe and Fernandez-Gued maintain that conservative and authoritarian feelings increased in the Spanish electorate following the Madrid attacks
(2006).
Moreover, in a global analysis, it should be noted that 47 leftist terrorist groups were identified by Weinberg to be either created by an (extreme) left party or a left party faction that broke away and created a terrorist group (2003, p. 30, 44-45). In their examination of the 1960s and 1970s, Weinberg and Eubank (1992, p. 132) report that while 40.4 per cent of terrorist groups were in countries where right-wing political parties were winning votes in parliamentary elections, 61.5 percent of terrorist groups were in countries where left-wing parties won votes (but these percentages would be closer depending on how one classifies nationalist, regionalist, and religious parties).
It has to be said that there is not much theoretical discussion on why political parties fare the way they do in the face of terrorism. The underpinning of much of the literature appears to be that in the face of threats, people espouse more authoritarian values and this benefits right-wing political parties rather than left-wing political parties. Yet, it is noteworthy here that even in the case of Israel where support for the incumbent right-wing political party is reported, there is a difference between local and non-local vote whereby local terror fatalities result in an increase for the right even in left-leaning parts of the country but in non-local terror fatalities, the right-wing parties lose votes. If the issue was solely about a turn to the right when confronted with terrorism, we would expect to see neither the left at times gaining votes such as in Spain nor a turn away from the right in non-terror locations (Berrebi and Klor, 2008). In addition, Danzell (2010) argues that opposition political parties can be expected to turn to terrorism particularly when the incumbent's ideology is right-wing. Moreover, Krieger and Meierrieks (2010) report that welfare spending in Western European countries decreases terrorism and report that 8 terrorism decreases when left-wing governments are in place. Bourgon (2006) also maintains that left-wing governments should decrease terrorism because they should be able to bring in excluded groups; in fact, exclusion appears to increase the chances that excluded minorities will turn to terrorism (Satana, Inman, and Birnir, 2013).
Chenoweth (2013) points towards the differences between transnational and domestic terrorism in explaining these rather contradictory findings but as Sánchez-
Cuenca and Luis de la Calle (2009) point out the distinction is questionable. Thus, despite the considerable interest on this topic, we do not have a clear understanding of how an incumbent party is able to avoid blame for terrorist attacks and consequent electoral losses. We next outline our argument that focuses on the role of party machines in the process of electoral accountability
Mediating Effect of Local Party Organizations
Although incumbency hurts politicians’ electoral chances when they cannot perform well in the provision of public goods such as security or economic growth, incumbent politicians can use state resources selectively in order to offset the negative consequences of poor performance in public good provision. There are mainly two manners through which incumbents can benefit from their control over state resources. They can either distribute benefits to a selective group of citizens within their clientelistic circle directly to change the recipients’ vote choices (Stokes, 2005; Kitschelt and Wilkinson 2007; Stokes et. al. 2013) or they can use state resources to build strong party organizations, which they can then use effectively in electoral campaigns (Kemahlioglu, 2012; Kopecky et. al, 2012;
Grzymala-Busse 2007).
We, therefore, argue that incumbent parties at the national level can use their control over state resources to either directly change the vote of potential constituents that 9 might turn away from them as a result of their failure against political violence through vote buying or to conduct a more effective electoral campaign through strong local party organizations. With the help of these local party organizations they can more effectively convince potential supporters that they have conducted an important anti-terrorist campaign and that the results of their efforts might need some more time to materialize.
With respect to Turkey, scholars have shown evidence of both ways that patronage and clientelistic resources are employed by incumbent politicians and parties. While
Kemahlioglu (2012) shows that party activists and members are hired in the public sector in return for their party and campaign work, Carkoglu and Aytac (2013) provides evidence from list experiments in survey analysis that citizens, when voting, take into account the particularistic material benefits they receive from parties. In contrast, Chile is considered as one of the unique cases in the developing world that is relatively free of patronage and clientelism (Calvo and Murillo, 2013).
Since we cannot measure the extent of patronage distribution in each municipality, we use local government control as a proxy of patronage and clientelistic resources controlled by the national incumbent party. Since the national incumbent party in that case can both channel more resources to their co-partisans at the local level and use these resources to benefit the party in the national legislative elections, we expect the negative electoral consequences of violence to be offset by local party mobilization when the national incumbent party also controls the local government in a municipality.
We would expect this effect to be especially paramount if central financial resources are important for local governments and some amount of discretion is allowed in the allocation of central resources to municipalities (Scheiner, 2005). Even after some decentralization efforts in both Chile and Turkey, they remain as highly centralized unitary countries (Eaton, 2004; Loewendahl-Ertugal, 2005). Therefore, for both cases central government transfers to municipalities are essential. However, an important 10 difference exist between them is that while some element of discretion is allowed in the allocation of resources to municipalities in the case of Turkey (Mutluer and Oner, 2009),
Chile has established universal rules in the distribution of resources from the national government to local governments (Eaton, 2004).
Another important characteristic of the period of analysis for the case of Chile is that the elections prior to which terrorism was especially destructive and frequent correspond to the immediate aftermath of the transition from Pinochet rule. We, therefore, would expect that the party organizations might not have had much time and opportunity yet to establish themselves after a pretty long period of repression (almost fourteen years) under an authoritarian regime that did not allow any electoral competition or existence of parties. Therefore, through the lack of time to build effective party machines and lack of discretionary financial transfers from the national government, Chile poses itself as a hard case to find a mediating effect of local incumbency on how terrorism might hurt national incumbent parties.
Party System in Chile and Turkey
The party system in Chile has been considered as one of the most institutionalized, at least at the elite level (Luna and Altman, 2011), in Latin America and even in the developing world (Mainwaring and Scully, 1995). Although three cleavages - religious, urban and rural class conflict - are identified as the important ones that led to the formation of the party system as existed prior to military intervention in 1973 (Scully, 1995), these cleavages collapsed on one single dimension and the main parties could be located along this single left-right policy (ideological) space. The Popular Action Front (FRAP) - including the Socialist Party - whose presidential candidate , Salvador Allende, under the
Popular Unity electoral bloc won the last elections prior to the military intervention was the main representative on the left. Christian Democratic Party (PDC) emerged as the 11 stronger party at the center in its competition with the Radicals (PR) (Scully, 1995). The main right-wing parties, Liberals and Conservatives, formed the National Party coalition in 1967. Growing ideological polarization prior to the collapse of democracy was reflected in the party system through the formation of the Democratic Confederation (CODE) in opposition to Allende and the Popular Unity Coalition.
Polarization in the form of competition between two major electoral blocs continued after the transition to civilian rule in 1990 though there was a major realignment in the party system (Torcal and Mainwaring, 2003) where the composition of the electoral blocs changed most notably with the new alliance of the center with the left under the major governing coalition, Concertación, this time representing the opposition to the authoritarian rule (Torcal and Mainwaring, 2003). The binomial electoral systems introduced by the authoritarian government also played a role in the persistence of the two electoral blocs - the Concertación representing the center and the left and the Alianza representing the right (Valenzuela and Scully, 1997). The Communist Party (of Chile) that formed an important part of the PU coalition prior to the military intervention remained outside the center-left governing coalition until very recently.
Center-periphery cleavage including the religious element and class conflict also formed the two main forces behind the Turkish party system prior to the military intervention of 1980 that resurfaced after the transition to civilian rule in 1983 (Çarkoğlu
1998). As in Chile, repression, of especially the left, and changes in the electoral system, most notably the introduction of the ten percent threshold, by the authoritarian government also led to some important changes in the party system. Departing authoritarian government's enforcement of a ban on the prominent civilian politicians' political activities for ten years had left an empty space that was filled by new parties. However, the removal of the ban in the 1987 referendum brought back these politicians and partly led to the proliferation of parties in the center-left and center-right (Sayari, 1996). Two center-right 12 parties (Anavatan Partisi - Motherland Party, ANAP and Doğru Yol Partisi - True Path
Party, DYP) and two-center left parties (Republican People’s Party, RPP – formerly Social
Democratic Populist Party, SHP – and Democratic Left Party, DSP) played important roles in the coalition governments between 1991 and 2002. The 1990s also saw the small parties that existed on the extreme right prior to the coup gain prominence. The Welfare
Party (Refah Partisi, RP) emerged as the leading party in the 1995 elections though with a small margin of 1.73 percent. The nationalist party, MHP (Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi), in turn, participated in the three-party coalition after gaining 17.98 percent in the 1999 elections. Especially relevant for the link between terrorist activities and elections, an important change in the post-transition Turkish party system is the representation of the
Kurdish minority with its own party. Due to closures by the Constitutional Court, it has taken on different names. Currently HDP (Halklarin Demokrasi Partisi) represents the movement in the Parliament.
One of the most critical elections in the post-transition period of Turkey is the
2002 elections that brought AK Parti to power as a single party government. Since then, the party won three more legislative elections2, three municipal elections, two referenda and the country's first direct presidential elections. As a result, most scholars characterized the Turkish party system as a predominant one (Carkoglu 2011; Esen and Ciddi 2011;
Muftuler-Bac and Keyman 2012; Gumuscu 2013; Ayan Musil 2014). In this new party system, the CHP emerged as the main opposition party and the MHP and HDP as the two other major parties represented in the Parliament.
In the light of these party system characteristics, we would expect some differences in the way voters respond to the terrorist activities in Chile and Turkey irrespective of the mediating role of the local party machines. The incumbent governing coalition of the 1990s in Chile, Concertación, is expected to lose votes as a result of
2 AKP won the plurality, but not the majority in the June 2015 elections. 13 terrorist activities at the center to Alianza, on the left to the Communist Party or in the form of invalid, protest votes if the voters are not satisfied with the incumbent, but are not willing to vote for the alternatives, either. In Turkey, the fragmented multi-party system of the 1990s provided ample opportunities for the dissatisfied voters to switch their votes, but clarity of responsibility (Powell and Whitten 1993) was low due to short lived, unstable coalition governments. In the aftermath of 2002 elections, in turn, dissatisfied supporters of the AK Parti are expected to switch to MHP or smaller religious parties if they are part of their conservative base, switch to HDP if they are Kurdish, and decide not to vote if they are not willing to vote for these alternatives.
Terrorism and Elections in Chile and Turkey
According to Global Terrorism Database, Chile is ranked in the top twenty most frequently attacked countries during the 1970- 2007 period. Since the seventeen years of
Pinochet rule was a period of intense state terror, most of the studies on violence in Chile tend to focus on state terror rather than terrorist activities carried out by non-state actors.
Although currently not well remembered, Chile was faced with frequent terrorist attacks in the years immediately following the transition to civilian rule in 1990. For example, in
1991 a report by Asociación Latinoamericana para los Derechos Humanos (ALDHU) ranked Chile in the third place behind Colombia and Peru among the Latin American countries that faced terrorist attacks (Americas Watch Report, 1991).
In this period most of the terrorist activity was carried out by FPMR3 (Manuel
Rodríguez Patriotic Front) Autónomo (that split from FPMR after the transition to civilian rule), Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR) and MJL (Lautaro Youth Movement)
(Americas Watch Report, 1991). In the beginning of 1990, MJL and FPMR were mainly
3 FPMR was formed in 1983. It is considered to be affiliated with the Communist Party of Chile (Feldmann, 2005; Castañeda, 1993). When the Communist Party rejected violence and decided to participate in electoral politics after transition to civilian rule, FPMR-A split from the FPMR. 14 responsible for the sharp increase in the number of terrorist incidents. Both of the groups had been founded in the 1980s and continued the armed struggle after the democratic elections (Feldmann, 2005). Jaime Guzmánm's, a senator and doctrinal founder of the conservative Independent Democrat Union party, assassination in April 1991 by FPMR-A was one of the most critical terrorist activities of the period. Especially after Guzmán’s assassination, but even prior to that, terrorist attacks were used by the right to create a perception of insecurity among citizens, which then could be used to increase the power of
Pinochet and the military against the civilian government. In response to these attacks and the rightist propaganda, the first civilian President Patricio Aylwin Azócar’s government took measures to empower the police forces under the control of the Ministry of Interior and “took legal action” against the FPMR-A and the MJL (Americas Watch Report,
1991).
However, rather than Aylwin and his government, it was the army and the right and their voices that reached the population through widely circulating newspapers such as
El Mercurio and La Epoca. Therefore, we expect the party organization to be especially critical in disseminating information about Aylwin government’s anti-terrorist efforts although Chilean party organizations in this period are expected to be weak and not to benefit much from local incumbency and partisan ties with national incumbents.
The history of terrorism in Turkey has a long history (Mango 2005; Ergil 1980).
The focus here will be on Turkey since the 1990s and thus the terrorist attacks against
Turkish diplomats or the extreme leftist/rightist terrorist acts in the 1970s will not be considered. In a 2007 Turkish police report, the 12 main active groups listed by the
Turkish emanated from three main types: ethnic-based, religion-based, and leftist groups.
The ethnic-based one has particularly received attention. The majority of domestic activities can be attributed to Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê (PKK). While the PKK and its captured leader has changed some of its demands over time, PKK is a major component 15 of the Kurdish question that continues to be a central issue in Turkey including for democratization and electoral politics (Tezcür 2010; Kibris 2011; Kibris 2014).
Yet, other types of terrorism also exist. In the 2000s, al-Qaeda and later Islamic
State were linked to major terrorist attacks in Turkey. However, local organizations such as Islamic Great Eastern Raiders-Front and Hezbellah have been around for considerably longer and were willing to challenge Turkey's secular nature. Since they share al-Qaeda's vision, some of the acts tied to al-Qeada in Turkey were carried by these local groups.
Left-wing groups in Turkey might not be as active as in the 1970s but Marxist-Leninist organizations who are anti-US and anti-NATO, such as The Revolutionary People's
Liberation Party–Front, continue to conduct attacks, e.g., on September 10, 2001, their suicide bomb attack resulted in four deaths and twenty injuries (Mango 2005).
Between 1990 and 2011, the Global Terrorism Database lists 1944 terrorist events in Turkey. It reports 96 terrorism events spread throughout Turkey between the 2007 elections and 2011 elections, 144 between the 2002 and 2007, 121 between 1999 and
2002, 169 between 1995 and 1999, 1016 between 1991 and 1995, and 576 between 1987 and 1991 (START 2013a). While one needs to be careful with comparing the terrorism from one election period with another period, the greater amount of terrorism for the
1990s compared to later years has face validity. Of course, the terrorism events are not evenly distributed. For example, after the capture of the leader of PKK in February 1999, there is a spike the following month with 34 events. Yet, terrorism is distributed around the country and 49 different provinces have had terrorist attacks. Moreover, of all the 39 municipalities in Istanbul, we only were able to identify nine municipalities throughout this period that did not witness any terrorism. Regional effects of terrorism differ, including in economic growth (Öcal and Yıldrım, 2010). Poverty, ethnic heterogenety, and residential mobility have been shown to be predictive of terrorism across the 81
Turkish provinces (Akyuz and Armstrong, 2011). Compared to other countries such as Sri 16
Lanka, suicide terrorism was not particularly common in Turkey until very recently. For example, Ergil (2000) is able to identify only 15 suicide attacks for PKK between 1995 and 1999.
This amount of attacks is difficult to ignore especially as these attacks did result in loss of life. Incumbency hurts politicians’ electoral chances when they cannot perform well in the provision of public goods such as security or economic growth. It should be said that both in the case of parliamentary, i.e., Turkey (Kıbrıs, 2011), as well as presidential systems (Holmes and de Piñeres, 2012) incumbent governments are blamed for losses and that repeated attacks result not in support but criticism of the incumbent
(Chowanietz, 2010).
There is not much quantitative work analyzing terrorism specifically in Chile or
Turkey. Through an examination of military funerals attributed to PKK terrorism, Kıbrıs
(2011; see also Kıbrıs 2014) demonstrates that in the 1991 and 1995 elections, voters were sensitive to the deaths of soldiers attributed to PKK and they blamed the government for the deaths. Moreover, this results in voters turning to right-wing political parties, particularly to opposition right-wing political parties.
With respect to Turkey, scholars have presented evidence as mentioned above that incumbent politicians and parties also enjoy some benefits through their control over financial resources. Therefore, keeping their performance in the provision of public goods, incumbent parties are expected to gain electorally from their control over the government.
However, we do not know whether the evaluations of security or the provision of private material goods weighs in more strongly in the Turkish elections. For example, the incumbent right-wing political party in the 2011 elections faced at least two conflicting forces: on the one hand, terrorism was present but on the other hand, they might have been able to address terrorism through the advantages of incumbency and this could have led the effects of terrorism to be mitigated. 17
Analysis
The analysis is conducted at the municipal level. The dependent variable is the vote share of the national incumbent party in that municipality in the legislative elections. We also include the party’s vote share in the previous legislative elections to control for the base level of support in the municipality for the party. The Turkish analyses rely upon data provided by Turkish Statistical Institute.4 Municipal level election results in Chile were accessed from SERVEL’s (Servicio Electoral de Chile) website.5 Since our dependent variable is continuous, we rely upon ordinary least squares regression and also use robust standard errors.
Our main terrorism variable takes on the value of one if a terrorist attack took place in the municipality since the last legislative election. We interact this variable with whether the incumbent party controlled the municipality or not. We also controlled for whether any terrorism took place within the province in which the municipality is located in the past (which due to space issues we do not report here). This second variable helps to capture the proximate time and spatial effects of terrorism on elections as voters can be influenced by what happened not just since the last election cycle but also in the past and they might also be influenced by proximate events. The correlation between the two terror variables is below 0.5 for most election years.
Our terrorism variables are influenced by what is used in publications on electoral politics and terrorism. We decided to rely upon Global Terrorism database due to its comprehensiveness and extensive usage in the past (Newman, 2013; Şatana, Inman and
Birnir, 2013; Robbins, Hunter and Murray, 2013). A terrorist attack is defined in this database “as the threatened or actual use of illegal force and violence by a non‐state actor
4 http://www.tuik.gov.tr/ 5 The data were accessed from the web page, http://historico.servel.cl/, on various dates between September 2010 and February 2014. 18 to attain a political, economic, religious, or social goal through fear, coercion, or intimidation” which needs to satisfy two of the following three criteria: the act should not fall under humanitarian international law, the act must have a political, economic, religious or social goal, and the act must not be just targeted at the immediate victims
(Start, 2013b, p. 7-8). Since the location of many terrorist attacks are missing in the data set, additional research was conducted to identify the municipality of the terrorist attack.
In studies that analyze the relationship between terrorism and elections some focused on support for political parties (Holmes and de Piñeres, 2012; Kıbrıs, 2011) and others on voter turnout (Robbins, Hunter and Murray, 2013). In our case, we were unable to find voter turnout information from Chile at the municipal level and thus we are not able to examine voter turnout.
We also include in the analyses control variables that measure the socio-economic condition of the municipality. For Turkey, the overall economic development of the municipality is measured by illiteracy rate6 for the last two elections or a development index for the previous elections. The index is developed by the DPT (Devlet Planlama
Teskilati – State Planning Organization) and is a composite measure of fifteen variables.7
These variables and the index are provided for the 872 municipalities in 2004. The most developed municipalities are excluded from the index. For Chile, socio-economic development of the municipality is measured by (logged) average income. The data were gathered by the Survey, Encuesta CASEN, administered by the Ministry of Social
Development.8 Finally, we control for the size of the municipality in Turkey by including the (logged) number of registered voters in that municipality and in Chile with the
6 Municipal level illitracy data can be accessed from TUIK’s web page, http://www.tuik.gov.tr/ 7 Dinçer, Bülent ve Metin Özaslan 2004, “İlçelerin Sosyo-Ekonomik Gelişmişlik Sıralaması Araştırması (2004)”, DPT Bölgesel Gelişme ve Yapısal Uyum Müdürlüğü. 8 The data can be accessed from the Ministry’s web page, http://www.ministeriodesarrollosocial.gob.cl/casen/bases_datos.html. 19
(logged) population data from the 1992 Census.9 In the analyses of Turkish elections we also include a control variable that takes on the value of one when the municipality is located in the Southeast since PKK attacks frequently take place in this region and the
Kurdish nationalist parties receive votes from Kurdish citizens who form a large part of the population in this area. The coding replicates the procedures in Kibris (2011). We provide descriptive statistics in the appendix.
Results
In Table 1, we present the results for Turkey. In Model 1, we start with the incumbent single party rule by examining AK Parti’s share of the vote in the 2011 general elections for all municipalities. Most of the time terrorism only took place once (34 as compared to 16 cases where terrorism occurred twice or more). In Model 1, while the variable capturing the terrorist incidents is negative and significant, the interaction variable is insignificant.10 Thus, while terrorism was making the incumbent party lose votes in locations where it did not control the municipality, in locations where it controlled the municipality, terrorist attacks were not making the party lose votes. The substantive effect is quite high as the party lost 6 percent of votes when the municipality suffered from a terrorist attack.
[Table 1 about here]
While not all terror activities in Turkey take place in the east and southeast provinces, it is clear that this region has experienced more than its fair share of terrorism.
Thus, like previous work (Kıbrıs, 2011), we removed these provinces and estimated the same model with a smaller set of municipalities; similar results are found. In fact, in other analyses that we did with opposition parties, we saw the BDP increased its votes in the
9 The Census data can be accessed from the National Institute of Chile’s website, http://www.ine.cl/ 10 The marginal effect is equal to -1.06 and teh standard error for the marginal effect is equal to 1.95. 20 east and southeast of the country (including in locations where terrorism occurred-given the ties between BDP and PKK this is not surprising).
We next analyze the results for the 2007 general elections. There are 38 instances of a municipality being attacked only once and 13 instances where terrorism occurred more than once. In Model 2, we find that terrorism from 2002 to 2007 has had no effects on the incumbent AK Parti’s share of the vote. One difference here from Model 1 is that even outside of the municipalities that it controls, it is not affected. Given that the 2002-
2007 period is when PKK terrorism starts again following a hiatus, it is important that the party was able to avoid losing votes in such an atmosphere. The finding is also similar even if we exclude the east and southeast provinces.
In Model 3, we turn to the 2002 elections. Unlike the 2007 and 2011 elections, the government in this case was a three party coalition led by the DSP that also included
ANAP and MHP. Terrorism between 1999 and 2002 was limited with 29 cases where a municipality experienced terrorism only once and only 13 instances where a municipality experienced more than once. Once again, it is found that the incumbent political parties despite other problems (mainly an economic crisis in 2001) were not affected by terrorism.
In Models 4 and 5, we are examining periods when terrorism was much more rampant in Turkey. The 1995-1999 era (Model 4) witnessed many coalitions of short duration among different political parties. We examined here the votes of ANAP, DYP,
DSP, DTP, and RP (all parties that joined a coalition government in this period). At the municipality level, the incumbent parties do not appear to lose votes due to terrorism.
While we have 28 instances of municipalities having only one terrorist attack and 11 instances where they had more than one terrorist attack, we believe that this low count is not capturing the full amount of terrorist attacks as at the province level there were 40 instances of terrorist attack occurring once within a province and 26 cases of a province having more than once (with two provinces having 48 attacks). This is partly because the 21 terrorist attacks during this era are more difficult to pin down with several references to terrorist attack occurring on the road among two or more municipalities and also finding data sources is harder. However, when we use a continuous province terrorism variable and interact it with the municipality control variable, the results are the same-positive but considerably short of statistical significance even at 10%.
In Model 5, we examine the 1991-1995 period, a period of heightened PKK terrorism. Although this was a period of a stable coalition government between CHP (SHP prior to June 1993) and DYP, we again cannot find an effect of terrorist attacks on the incumbent parties’ vote shares. Here a key element is that the SHP had entered the 1991 elections with an agreement with a (Kurdish nationalist) party strong in the southeast of the country and had listed the Kurdish candidates of this party on its list. However, these
Kurdish members of parliament later resigned from CHP. Thus, a comparison of 1991 and
1995 vote for the CHP needs to bear in mind that the relatively weak showing of CHP in
1995 is due to the overly strong performance of the party in the southeast in 1991 even though the party machinery in the region was weak. If we exclude the southeast provinces or conduct the analysis only for the Southeast, the results are similar.
In Table 2, we present the results for the Chilean elections. Since terrorism was a major concern in the early years of the post-transition period, we focus only on the 1993 and 1997 elections. The dependent variable is the vote share of the Concertación, the national incumbent coalition, in a municipality. Given the considerable loss in cases when we include the average income variable, we present here two sets of results - with and without the income variable. In the case of the 1993 elections presented in Model 1, concurring our theoretical expectations, terrorist attacks in a Concertación municipality does not lead to a loss in the coalition's vote share. The marginal effect of the terror variable (whether a terrorist attack occurred in a municipality between 1989 and 1993) when the municipality is controlled by Concertación is equal to 0.74 and it is not 22 statistically significant at 95 percent (the covariance of the two interacted variables is -
11.31). When we exclude the income variable and conduct the analysis with the whole sample (Model 3), the results are similar. The marginal effect is now equal to -2.1 and again not statistically significant at 95 percent (the covariance is now -25.68). In contrast, in locations where they do not control the municipality, terrorism clearly has a large and negative effect on the incumbent coalition's vote. The coefficient for the terror variable is -
14.18 in Model 1 and -19.89 in Model 3. Both are statistically significant at 95 percent.
Thus, through their use of local party organizations the Chilean incumbents seemed to have been able to convince the electorate that they were effectively carrying out security policies to protect them from terrorism and thus avoid electoral punishment for terrorist activities.
[Table 2 about here]
In Models 2 and 4 that analyze the 1997 elections, the major change in the findings is that in locations where the Concertación does not control the municipality, terrorism does not lead to a loss of votes. The coefficient of the terror variable (the number of terrorist activities between 1993 and 1997) is positive, but not statistically significant at 95 percent neither in Model 2 nor Model 4. This is not surprising given that even by 1997 the number of terrorist activities in Chile declined to a large extent. The main variable of interest, i.e., the interaction between municipality control and terrorism is again insignificant.
When we briefly look at the findings for the control variables, we can see that there was a strong correlation between the vote shares of Concertación in 1993 and 1997, but not between 1989 and 1993. As expected, Concertación increases its votes in poorer and larger municipalities in 1993 elections. For the 1997 elections, the income level does not lead to a difference in the electoral coalition's vote share compared to the 1993 shares, but this time the coalition loses votes in large municipalities. 23
Overall our findings for the case of Chile suggests that the national incumbent coalition is held accountable for terrorist activities in the 1993 legislative election for which terrorism was most relevant, but still the incumbent parties could avoid electoral punishment in the locations where they controlled the local municipality. Therefore, even for the hard case of Chile, our theoretical hypothesis that local party organizations that are built through municipal resources help to mitigate the effect of terrorism on incumbents' electoral performance is supported.
Conclusion
The results for incumbent parties are particularly interesting both in the case of
Chile and Turkey as well as in the wider context. Our results broadly show that in two different contexts, local incumbency helps to alleviate the costs of terrorism for the national incumbent. The results for Chile are particularly important as it is shown that incumbency plays a role even in the context of left-wing governments. Moreover, in the
Turkish context, it is noteworthy that only when the incumbent is a single party government, it is held responsible for terrorist attacks and not when it is a coalition government as the theoretical argument of “clarity of responsibility” (Powell and Whitten
1993) would predict. At the same time, the incumbent party takes advantage of state resources and its partisan links with local governments to alleviate some of the electoral costs from terrorism.
Overall, our results point out the importance of considering various elements of political parties besides whether they are left-wing or right-wing. Our argument that local incumbency needs to be considered in terrorism studies received support. At the same time, our argument is not that in a context of terrorism, the local incumbency would help to increase votes but that it helps in controlling the damage. Nonetheless, our results speak to the discussions on whether right-wing or left-wing governments are punished more by 24 voters by demonstrating that being the national incumbent right-wing or left-wing parties can result in loss of votes due to terrorism and what is particularly important for the incumbent national party is whether the party can convince the voters that the government is effectively dealing with terrorism.
Since the quantitative study of electoral politics and terrorism in Chile and Turkey is limited, we are limited in the comparisons that we can make to the existing literature that deal with Chilean or Turkish elections. In the case of Turkey, our results differ from
Kibris (2011) but there are several differences between the research designs. For example, our cases are at the municipal level rather than the provincial level and our terrorism variable captures all terrorism events rather than those that resulted in military fatalities.
Moreover, Kıbrıs does not focus on the 2000s but terrorism remained a major societal concern of the electorate as shown in public opinion surveys in that era (Habertürk, 2011;
Cumhuriyet, 2011).
In the past, ghettos were pointed out as a breeding ground for terrorists, in part because of the lack of municipal services and lack of authority (TBB 2006). Ghettos are a reality in much of the developing world, including in relatively more developed Chile and
Turkey. While we do not directly study terrorism in ghettos, our study would suggest that as a municipality becomes more consolidated (particularly in terms of party machinery), there are implications for electoral politics. One implication is that national incumbent parties can avoid vote losses. Another implication is that the existence of party machinery might help in overcoming disillusionment with politics among the urban disenfranchised and turning to violence, including terrorism, in the first place. This second implication would have to be analyzed in greater extent. Overall, however, the results here confirm the importance of local politics, including the party machinery.
While in Turkey many terrorist attacks during the 2000s until very recently did not result in fatalities, it is important to bear in mind that there were attacks such as that in the 25
Güngören municipality of Istanbul in 2008 which resulted in double-digit civilian losses.
In fact, there is some evidence that the Güngören municipality acted fast in responding to the attacks first through crisis response coordination, providing emergency care, cleaning up the bomb damage and then by providing psychosocial support (Şavur and Tomas 2010) and assistance to shop owners and civilians as the Mayor (from the incumbent party) at the time said, “We made the citizens feel that the state was with them.... We enlightened the public about the event” (Zaman, 2008b). Güngören municipality major was reelected in
2009 elections with a higher turnout than when he was elected in 2004 and in the 2011 general elections, AK Parti received 55.6 percent of the vote (compared to 50.90 percent in the 2007 general elections). More recently, an exit poll from the June 2015 Turkish general elections has maintained that the terrorist bomb at the Diyarbakir meeting of the
Kurdish People's Democracy Party resulted in a 4.4% gain in votes (Cumhuriyet 2015); while this requires considerable additional analysis, it is noteworthy that the incumbent party was not controlling the metropolitan municipality of Diyarbakir and saw its vote share in Diyarbakir plummet.
At the same time, the results here raise questions on whether the results found in the context of Chilean and Turkish elections can also be seen in other countries. Further qualitative examination can also be illuminating. There is some interest in institutional features and this can be incorporated into future research as well. For example, it has been argued that terrorism affects Indian states (Piazza, 2010) where there are elections with more competitive parties or where there is a minority party government but dominance of largest party in legislature decreases terrorism. Such features can be considered within other countries as well.
Studies that focus on municipal results and not provincial level data when examining terrorism’s effects on elections are rare. The municipal level is difficult to work with as there is limited public data, but we believe that our results show that more research 26 is necessary to understand how terrorism influences and is in return influenced by municipal-level politics in the future. 27
Table 1. Elections in Turkey and Terrorism
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) VARIABLES 2011 2007 2002 1999 1995
Lagged vote share 0.94*** 0.83*** 0.30*** 0.74*** 0.57*** (0.015) (0.019) (0.024) (0.032) (0.033) Terrorist attack -6.23*** -2.06 0.81 0.83 1.61 (1.935) (2.178) (1.724) (2.901) (1.918) Municipal Control -0.57 2.76*** 1.01** -0.90 2.83*** (0.425) (0.537) (0.471) (0.715) (0.670) Mayor* Terrorism 5.17* 3.73 -0.75 -1.08 -2.70 (2.759) (3.518) (2.732) (4.553) (3.219) Socio-economic development -0.20*** 0.41*** 0.64*** -1.05*** -2.39*** (0.046) (0.052) (0.250) (0.331) (0.368) (Logged) Voters -1.33*** -0.56** -1.20*** -0.64 -2.50*** (0.159) (0.227) (0.296) (0.397) (0.462) Southeast -5.98*** 5.32*** 3.28*** 4.71*** -10.72*** (1.045) (1.444) (1.021) (1.529) (1.593) Constant 24.87*** 18.52*** 11.43*** 16.47*** 36.60*** (1.875) (2.551) (4.029) (5.140) (5.274)
Observations 913 904 845 826 784 R-squared 0.876 0.741 0.305 0.499 0.509 Robust standard errors in parentheses *** p<0.01, ** p<0.05, * p<0.1
28
Table 2. Elections in Chile and Terrorism (1) (2) (3) (4) VARIABLES 1993 1997 1993 1997
Lagged Concertacion Votes -0.10* 0.50*** 0.04 0.61*** (0.057) (0.120) (0.061) (0.068) Terrorist attack -14.18*** 7.13 -19.89*** 4.02 (3.632) (5.639) (5.316) (3.502) Concertacion Mayor 1.03 4.09** 2.36 3.54** (1.971) (2.015) (1.534) (1.373) Mayor*Terrorism 14.92*** -6.37 17.79*** -4.88 (3.530) (6.153) (5.136) (4.333) (Logged) Average Income -8.43*** -1.10 (1.716) (2.126) (Logged) Population 1.89** -1.77** 2.13*** -0.91* (0.895) (0.879) (0.618) (0.486) Constant 144.49*** 53.14** 30.04*** 24.16*** (18.664) (25.877) (5.750) (5.942)
Observations 201 187 330 335 R-squared 0.220 0.179 0.134 0.300
Robust standard errors in parentheses *** p<0.01, ** p<0.05, * p<0.1
29
Appendix
Descriptive Statistics for Chilean Data
Variable Obs Mean Std. Dev. Min Max
1993 Data Concertación votes 330 54.06233 10.668 20.9 88.56 Lag. Conc. votes 330 47.40409 13.89988 7.04 76.25 Terrorist attacks 330 .1545455 .3620198 0 1 Mayor 330 .8090909 .3936144 0 1 Mayor* Terrorism 330 .1393939 .3468831 0 1 (Logged) average income 201 12.20057 .4497944 11.49 14.32 (Logged) population 330 9.721517 1.376236 4.88 12.70
1997 Data Concertación votes 335 50.29813 12.44169 .4149 83.04 Lag. Conc. votes 335 54.13272 10.65754 20.9 88.56 Terrorist attacks 335 .0626866 .242761 0 1 Mayor 335 .558209 .497343 0 1 Mayor* Terrorism 335 .0447761 .2071214 0 1 (Logged) average income 187 12.73948 .4450376 12.00 14.82 (Logged) population 335 9.72616 1.374973 4.88 12.70
30
Descriptive Statistics for Turkish Data
Variable Obs Mean Std. Dev. Min Max
2011
AKP vote share 913 52.53604 16.14576 3.85 91.53 Lagged AKP vote 913 47.87808 15.67002 3.70 87.41 Terrorist attack 913 .0492881 .2165875 0 1 Mayor 913 .4983571 .5002713 0 1 Mayor*Terrorism 913 .0186199 .1352526 0 1 Illiteracy rate 913 13.61614 9.643964 .05 67.97 (Logged) Voters 913 9.959096 1.209764 7.04 13.33 Southeast 913 .1522453 .3594554 0 1
2007
AKP vote share 904 47.89586 15.60213 3.70 87.41 Lagged AKP vote 904 32.75 15.41 1.70 73.65 Terrorist attack 904 .050885 .2198844 0 1 Mayor 904 .4988938 .5002756 0 1 Mayor*Terrorism 904 .0154867 .1235466 0 1 Illiteracy Rate 904 13.63948 9.682425 .05219 67.97 (Logged) Voters 904 9.93 1.14 7.23 13.28 Southeast 904 .1537611 .3609192 0 1
2002
Incumbent vote share 845 18.04699 7.715206 2.52 56.07 Lagged incumbent vote 845 49.67715 15.37124 6.71 79.66 Terrorist Attack 845 .0272189 .1628172 0 1 Mayor 845 .4781065 .4998163 0 1 Mayor*Terrorism 845 .008284 .0906925 0 1 Development index 845 3.659172 1.309753 1 6 (Logged) voters 845 9.824035 .9904702 7.28 13.06 Southeast 845 .1656805 .3720138 0 1
1999
Incumbent vote share 826 61.66301 12.38509 23.07 91.90 Lagged incumbent vote 826 74.12896 12.20109 20.78 95.86 Terrorist Attack 826 .027845 .1646284 0 1 Mayor 826 .6864407 .4642206 0 1 Mayor*Terrorism 826 .0157385 .1245374 0 1 Development index 826 3.673123 1.311831 1 6 (Logged) voters 826 9.7635 .9603144 7.06 12.92 Southeast 826 .1610169 .3677693 0 1
31
1995
Incumbent vote 784 30.7146 12.45141 1.33 83.60 Lagged incumbent vote 784 48.45124 13.63987 9.12 95.38 Terrorist Attack 784 .1262755 .3323716 0 1 Mayor 784 .3010204 .4589944 0 1 Mayor*Terrorism 784 .0420918 .2009269 0 1 Development Index 784 3.664541 1.283939 1 6 (Logged) voters 784 9.701505 .9323392 7.09 12.54 Southeast 784 .1415816 .3488431 0 1 32
Acknowledgements: The research of this project is funded by Marie Curie International Reintegration Grants (IRG). Ozge Kemahlioglu is grateful for this support. We would also like to thank Elif Ozdemir and Merve Beydemir for their research assistance. 33
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