News Coverage of Electoral Violence and Electoral Fraud: Comparative Evidence from Turkish Elections

This study seeks to add to the existing scholarship on electoral violence by looking at the media coverage of the phenomenon. Although the literature on electoral integrity and violence is growing, there are only a handful of studies available on how the news media cover allegations of electoral violence. Moreover there is virtually no research comparing media coverage of electoral violence with that of other types of electoral integrity problems such as fraud. To this end, proposed paper has two aims. First, it will examine the nature and distribution fraud and violence news in Turkish newspapers during the 2014 local and June 2015 parliamentary elections. Second it will relate the content of news and newspapers’ ideological stances to electoral violence and fraud news.