Search

What happens to the anti-establishment sentiments of pro-incumbent voters for a populist force that is in government and thus controls the political system? This article examines this question utilizing the case of Turkey, a country in which a populist force has been in power for more than a decade. By analyzing populist attitudes among a nationally representative sample, we demonstrate that while the voters of the incumbent populist party (AKP) are less likely, compared to everyone else, to hold populist sentiments, the same voters are also substantially more likely to endorse conspiracy theories that center on malign foreign powers. This finding is relevant beyond Turkey, because it demonstrates that populist forces might be able to maintain popular support and thus stay in power for a long stretch of time by employing government propaganda to fuel an antagonism against conspiratorial foreign and global forces.

We administer a survey of economic policy preferences to a representative sample of the Turkish voting-age population. We show that policy preferences are distributed in non-linear ways that are at odds with what could be expected from a conventional left-right division. We find that while objective socioeconomic differences are bad at predicting economic policy preferences, the latter are distinctly associated with politically salient cleavages built on religiosity and ethnicity. We also examine how preferences of each party's voters compare with party programmes.

Established wisdom is sceptical of direct linkages between economic hardship and contentious mobilization. Occupy protests seem to constitute an anomaly in this regard by their very existence, but factors associated with these events have not been investigated yet. This study of 398 self-designated Occupy protests across 180 countries finds that the country’s level of inequality was associated with a higher rate of protest. Equally important were the severity of the downturn in GDP growth in 2007–11 and the level of democracy. The results offer some evidence for the ‘inverse J-curve’ hypothesis whereby an economic boom period followed by a downturn is conducive to protest. Few studies have previously investigated the influence of inequality and economic growth on political protest across a diverse set of countries going beyond OECD democracies. The applicability of these findings to protest events more generally needs to be corroborated and discussed in future work.

Economic voting studies have repeatedly shown that voter's assessment of incumbent economic performance is important for the vote decision. However, there is little work explaining how individuals form their economic assessments. Utilizing individual-level data from Turkey, we find that variation in retrospective assessments can actually be predicted by individual income growth rates over the previous year, and the association is stronger for pocketbook assessments. Nonetheless, partisanship and media are important sources of bias, especially for sociotropic assessments. Controlled for partisanship, viewers of pro-government media are more likely to think that the national economy has done better than their own household over the last year, and also more likely to believe that the economy would fare worse if the incumbent is replaced. The findings testify both to the capacity of the individuals to anchor their assessments to personal experience, and to the media's ability to weaken this anchor.

Due to copyright restrictions, the access to the full text of this article is only available via subscription. Within the literature on financial governance a key question is why the 2008 financial crisis did not elicit a stronger regulatory reaction than it did – the ‘post-crisis stasis’ puzzle. We explore a neglected dimension of this puzzle: public attitudes toward financial regulation. Using a variety of survey data of the US public we find that there was persistent support for stronger financial regulation following the crisis, even support for radical reform in some instances, and support continued even after regulatory reform had been enacted. Despite such general sentiment, however, at nearly every stage public attitudes were highly conditional on partisan affiliation – a hugely consequential detail that meant that demand for reform was not channelled into more stringent policy but rather into a highly partisan, status quo protecting political machinery. Our analysis challenges notions of US public attitudes as either conservative in orientation or placated through modest reform, but also highlights the importance of domestic political constraints in shaping financial reform options despite majoritarian support for more robust reform.