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Why do voters support executive aggrandizement? One possible answer is that they do so because they think this will ease their preferred leader’s hand in putting their partisan vision into action, provided that the leader will continue winning elections. We study this phenomenon through a survey experiment in Turkey, by manipulating voters’ perceptions about the potential results of the first presidential election after a constitutional referendum of executive aggrandizement. We find that voters from both sides display what we call “elastic support” for executive aggrandizement; that is, they change previously revealed constitutional preferences in response to varying winning chances. This elasticity increases not only when citizens feel greater social distance to perceived political “others” (i.e., affective polarization) but also when voters are concerned about economic management in a potential post-incumbent era. Our findings contribute to the literature on how polarization and economic anxiety contribute to executive aggrandizement and democratic backsliding. 1

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.

Turkey’s biosafety regulations allow genetically modified food to be imported from abroad while prohibiting cultivation in Turkey – a puzzling regime that discriminates against domestic production....

Due to copyright restrictions, the access to the full text of this article is only available via subscription. This article surveys the political economy of coups in Turkey, examining both their economic causes and the economic consequences they seem to generate. It reminds that whether coups had a negative causal effect on Turkish economic growth remains to be compellingly shown. It highlights that military intervention attempts tend to follow already troublesome economic times: Before the 1960 and 1980 coups, 1971 and 2007 memoranda, as well as the failed coup attempts in 1962 and 2016, economic growth slowed down compared to a previous five-year period. This is in line with global trends about coups becoming likely following slower economic growth. Furthermore, students of Turkish politics have noticed a more specific economic policy-making pattern centering on currency devaluation during episodes preceding coups. This article discusses whether such a pattern may be taken as a ‘local theory’ of Turkish coups while discussing its limitations.

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.

It is generally assumed that individuals take national economic performance into account while voting. But the question of how perceptions about the economy may be influenced by partisan media remains understudied. Analyzing survey data from Turkey with various robust analysis techniques we demonstrate that reliance on pro government media as a news source makes voters’ economic perceptions significantly more favorable, which in turn increases the likelihood of incumbent vote. In addition, we demonstrate that the audience of pro-government media are more likely to display “sociotropic overestimation”—thinking that the national economy has done better compared to their own household experience; and “counterfactual rationalization”—thinking, regardless of how they view actual economic performance, that it could be worse under alternative leadership. The results suggest that when the economy is manifestly deteriorating, authoritarian incumbents may try to use media influence to convince the electorate that the status quo is better than the alternatives.