Turkey’s seemingly simultaneous democratic gains and rollbacks present a puzzle suggesting a need to focus on the subnational dynamics of opposition and repression. As case in point, many analysts initially heralded opposition victories against ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) candidates in Turkey’s 2019 local elections, including major metropolitan centers such as Istanbul and Ankara, as proof of democratic resilience in an otherwise increasingly authoritarian regime. However, upon taking power in the previously AKP-dominated municipalities, Istanbul and Ankara opposition mayors faced numerous obstacles to their ability to govern, including threats of removal and indictments of party members, budget curtailments, and repeated claims they are involved in “terrorist” activities. Deeper analysis indicates that similar strategies of repression were used in the early 2010s by the AKP in Turkey’s Kurdish-majority municipalities. To understand these political, economic, and rhetorical dynamics of repression and how their use expands, this paper analyzes how competitive authoritarian regimes confront challenges arising from local politics. Specifically, we identify three authoritarian consolidation mechanisms of removal, hamstringing, and vilification of those opposition actors who do manage to be elected in order to weaken their potential challenge. Further, we demonstrate how the ruling party was able to hone these strategies in the eastern Kurdish region, where de-democratization measures were met with comparatively little public outcry from citizens in western Turkey. The paper incorporates municipal-level election and budget data, content analysis of AKP statements, observer reports of election irregularities, and in-depth interviews conducted in the Kurdish region to identify and process-trace its three strategies of authoritarian consolidation. Distinct from the dynamics of ethnic repression of Kurds witnessed under previous governments, we argue current practice represents the testing and expansion of an authoritarian repertoire in Turkey in response to democratic mobilization and opposition gains.

In authoritarianism research, legitimation and repression have received growing attention over the past years. However, these two strategies of political rule do not form separate pillars of power, they are interrelated and affect each other. Autocrats not only rely on coercion, they also seek to justify their use of repression vis-à-vis at least some of their citizens and the outside world. These legitimizing discourses are part of political communication in autocracies. The opacity of authoritarian regimes varies, impacting on how incumbents publicize, admit to, or conceal certain forms of repression. So far, few researchers of the protest–repression nexus have studied justifications of repression, mostly in the context of singular repressive events. This paper is the first to conceptualize and systematically investigate how officials in autocracies justify a variety of repressive acts directed against different targets. It outlines a conceptual framework based on insights from research on political violence, authoritarian legitimation, and political communication. Empirically, it analyzes justifications of repression in Morocco and Tunisia from 2000–2010. In their justifications, autocratic officials choose from a variety of frames based on legal, political, or societal arguments. Multiple factors influence which types of justification are used. One decisive factor is against which targets repression is employed. In framing the targets of repression in a certain way, autocratic elites seek to attain the approval of certain audiences while at the same time deterring potential or actual dissidents. Furthermore, justifications diverge regarding which actors use them and towards which audiences. The sources for this paper are reports by human rights organizations complemented by news reports describing repressive incidents and their respective justifications. Collected systematically in a database, the extent of justification as opposed to denial or cover-up is analyzed. The paper investigates repressive incidents against individual activists, studying the change of justifications over time. In addition, it covers repressive episodes in the context of larger protest events, such as in Gafsa or Sidi Ifni in 2008. This approach is an innovative way of studying state-society relations and regime durability in autocracies. It adds an important piece to the puzzle of authoritarian survival strategies illuminating the “dark side” of legitimation.

This paper explains when and why authoritarian regimes use repression by shedding light on the role domestic audiences play in violent outcomes. I argue that autocratic repression can be motivated by whether the bystanders of violence (not the direct targets thereof) support its use against opposition groups that threaten the status quo. The paper, which is a chapter from a book manuscript, unsettles conventional assumptions that authoritarian repression is intrinsically unpopular and has important policy implications for mitigating human rights violations. Drawing on 16 months of field research in Egypt and an original, geocoded dataset derived from web-scraping Arabic-language documents, I provide evidence of how strategies of repression can be used to rally support for autocratic rule.