Effects of Political Violence on Incumbent Political Parties

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.

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