How do the meanings attached to democracy reflect political polarization in a context where the very existence of democracy is seen to be in peril? Previous research examines polarization by focusing on the juxtaposition of competing terminologies while debating the same political issues. However, polarization can also be reflected by attaching different meanings to the same wordings. Moreover, scholarship tends to focus on relatively stable political cultures with an established democratic tradition. To advance our understanding of discursive reflections of political polarization, where the stability of democratic institutions themselves are being questioned, we analyze the online political discursive field during the June 2019 re-run Istanbul elections in Turkey. We create a dataset of approximately 116 thousand tweets and analyze Twitter discussions using both formal computational methods and qualitative text analysis. We find that the local re-run election was brought into the national spotlight in which the future of democracy was perceived to be at stake. We further conducted an in-depth analysis of the political discussion around three interrelated prominent themes: “democracy,” “elections,” and “public service.” Our findings indicate that public service came to be associated with an anti-corruption stance by the opposition. Conversely, for the supporters of the ruling party, public service embodies the ruling party’s past achievements. In addition, casting a vote was not simply associated with electing the preferred candidate, but more importantly, it was presented as the defense of democracy by the opposition. Our analyses indicate that public service came to be associated with an anti-corruption stance by the opposition. Conversely, for the supporters of the ruling party, public service embodies the ruling party’s past achievements. In addition, casting a vote was not simply associated with electing the preferred candidate, but more importantly, it was presented as the defense of democracy by the opposition. Our analyses imply that polarization is increasingly becoming a contestation over the meaning of foundational concepts. As such, our research endeavors to contribute to the literature on political polarization by looking at a disputed election as a case-study at the heights of these contestations. In our context, we can see competition over core concepts of democracy, and even democracy itself.

This paper analyzes the dichotomy of veiled versus unveiled women in contemporary Turkish society by particularly focusing on the experiences of ex-veiled women and their struggle. Female body (particularly the veiled female body) has been under increasingly close scrutiny during the last two decades of political transformation in Turkey. After coming to power in 2002, the AKP government struggled against the headscarf ban that had been in effect since 1980, and successfully lifted the ban in 2010. The infamous headscarf ban had been initiated by the Kemalist regime in an attempt to separate religion and government in Turkey, and control religion in the country (Taskin 80). Although Turkey has a long history of debate over the headscarf, and there have been other right-wing Islamist parties that were a part of the coalition government and the Turkish parliament, none of them succeeded in solving the headscarf problem before the AKP government. Since its establishment, the AKP used the headscarf ban as a trump card, and explicitly promised to solve this problem if people voted for them (Arat, “On the Emancipation” 50). The positive outcome of this act should not be underestimated, but while lifting the ban on the headscarf made Muslim women more visible in public, it also served to polarize Turkish women at different ends of the political spectrum; in Turkey, wearing a headscarf has never been a mere religious act, but rather, it is an instrument conveying political meanings that have been the subject of a struggle between secularists and Islamists (Vojdik 664). Moreover, women were divided into two spheres as either secularist elites who represented the republican/Kemalist ideology, or conservative/Islamist lower-to-middle class veiled women who became the symbol of the AKP government. This created a dichotomy of “veiled versus unveiled” that corresponds to “chaste, modest, decent versus sexually assertive” women (Cindoglu 40). In the vein, this paper analyzes a feminist platform established by ex-veiled women who share their struggles anonymously and have been facing social scrutiny by the pro-government media. The platform poses as a threat to the government’s ideology as they are the women around whom the AKP government centered their discourses, but these women now claimed that they are not pro-government and that their lives have become more difficult in the last decade due to becoming political symbols of the AKP.

How is the ascending authoritarian discourses and practices of the regime in Turkey restructuring the realm of everyday life, outside of parliaments, courthouses, elections, and constitutions? I approach people’s sense of authoritarianism as a complex process of “becoming” rather than a one-time “choice” at the polls. Thus, it is crucial to examine people’s changing daily interactions, choices, conflicts, understandings, experiences and struggles to see how this current version of right-wing authoritarian populism plays out differently in ordinary men and women’s lives, and how ordinary people’s interactions contribute to or challenge the restructuring of the realm of everyday life. I analyze the 90 in-depth interviews and 90+ hours of urban bus ethnography that I conducted in Istanbul during the immediate post-emergency rule period (2018-2019). After thematically coding the accounts following the grounded theory methodology, in this paper, I focus on “distancing”—minimizing communication and interaction with both acquaintances and strangers based on increased conflict aversion and reduced trust among fellow citizens. I find that to maintain ties in the long-run with acquaintances and to avoid conflicts with strangers; people minimize communication on what they perceive to be politically contentious topics— any comment that sounds like complaints and being completely against or for the government’s actions. This encompasses a range of topics that cause people to get into arguments easily such as unemployment, soccer, skyrocketed prices of onions and potatoes, and many more. This theme of conversational micro fields crosscuts class, gender, and ideological position and closely related to the shifting boundaries of daily “normal(s)” in Istanbul such as choice of attire, use of language, ways of doing gender, and presenting ethnic and religious identities. I show how social and political polarization, aggravated by party elites and the media, affect men and women differently in the way they interact with each other. I contribute to the literature on polarization in authoritarian populisms by asserting that polarization shapes not only party politics and voter behavior but also people’s daily perceptions and networks and vice versa. Discussing these questions will pave the way for increasing knowledge about the potential consequences of prolonged populism and provide insights on how to strengthen democracy as a way of life as well as governance. Studying the gendered organization of authoritarian populism at the level of social interaction and contribute to the global debates with the case of Turkey could expand the theories that create an “Atlantic bias.”

This paper presents an original and timely theoretical framework with which to assess contests in and across divided polities. Emanating from a book manuscript currently under external review and based on over a decade of fieldwork including 100+ elite interviews in Turkey, Egypt, Israel, and Cyprus, it offers an alternative to binary readings of political contest as driven by clashes between “Islamists” vs. “secularists,” “Greeks” vs. “Turks,” or “Arabs” vs. “Israelis.” Rather, the paper argues, critical outcomes in and beyond the Middle East are driven by shifting alliances across camps. To capture this fluid complexity, the paper proposes a complex-systems inspired theoretical framework with which to trace the causal interplay between “ideas”, “agents”, and “structures” in the build-up to and during critical junctures. Ideas, agents, and structures are envisaged, in keeping with complexity theory, as parameters of a political system rather than as independent or dependent variables. Outcomes, as such, depend upon their evolving interactions rather than the primacy of, say, ideas over agents or structures. By thus employing a non-essentialist logic to identify the necessary and sufficient causes for an outcome of interest, the framework allows for causal claims which capture complexity rather than reduce outcomes to immutable identitarian commitments. The framework can help to debunk Orientalist perspectives and contributes to the rich tradition of historical sociology within political science. At the same time, it offers an intuitive, analytical-descriptive template which can help area studies experts across subfields to upload “thick” knowledge of critical junctures across cases towards a comparative research agenda. The framework is then applied to a series of recent political contests in Turkey since the 2002 rise of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) through to the February 2020 culmination of the Gezi Park trials. This enables the paper to demonstrate empirically that key outcomes like election and referenda results, mass uprisings, and political purges were caused by bargains struck—and broken—across camps and not by any immutable ideological / identitarian commitments.