Turkey’s democracy has been always imperfect. But since 1950, elections were for the most part free and fair. The institutions of military-bureaucratic tutelage established over the three decades following the 1960 coup were chiefly designed to limit the impact of elections and the influence of elected governments. The 10% threshold introduced after the 1980 coup was the only major tutelary intervention into the electoral system and it was intended to concentrate politics in the central mainstream. Kemalist tutelage came to an end during the 2000s but this did not lead to democratic consolidation in Turkey. By 2011, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) had established itself as the dominant force in Turkish politics. The party's and in particular its charismatic leader President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's efforts to consolidate their grip over Turkey's society and state institutions have pushed the country towards an increasingly illiberal, authoritarian path. But unlike the military guardians, the AKP and Erdogan still had to win elections; with stakes continually rising, losing became a non-option. This has had a direct and corrosive impact on the integrity of elections. With the electoral playing field heavily skewed towards the incumbent, a number of scholars have classified Turkey as a competitive authoritarian regime. Focusing on the general election of June 2015, which was effectively cancelled when the ruling party lost its parliamentary majority and repeated in November under drastically altered political circumstances, this paper looks at how competitive authoritarian regimes react when they face election losses and questions whether Turkey's new authoritarianism can still be labelled "competitive".

The hegemony in the production of knowledge enjoyed by Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) – which has grown more and more authoritarian over its 13 years in power – has been a crucial factor in the AKP’s ability to maintain a high level of support among Turkish society. The present paper will examine how knowledge has been produced by AKP think tanks for the benefit of the ruling party and how this knowledge has been promulgated to society by media channels which have been completely transformed into AKP mouthpieces during the party’s tenure. In the process, knowledge deemed necessary for society has become restricted to whatever is approved by the ruling party. At the same time, the AKP has promoted itself as the only political entity representative of the national values of Turkish society, branding all oppositional voices as elitist, traitorous, and Islamophobic. AKP-affiliated think tanks as well as the AKP’s “organic intellectuals” have taken on a key role in the production of information and its diffusion among the population.