The study of electoral violence has burgeoned in recent years, and we now have a good understanding of the aggregate-level factors associated with this phenomenon, including regime type, ethnic conflict, competitiveness, the presence of observers and informal and formal institutions. Though these studies attest to growing understanding of electoral violence perceptions, individual-level studies and media coverage of how people and mass media respectively attribute blame for electoral violence, especially for marginalized political actors, is nearly non-existent.
We seek to fill this gap with a case study on the perceptions of violence attributed to the politicians of Halkların Demokratik Partisi (People’s Democratic Party, HDP) which acts as the main political actor of Kurdish ethnic minority in Turkey. The data for this analysis drawn from two original datasets: (1) a database of incidents of alleged electoral violence derived from media reports, the Database of incidents of Electoral violence in Turkey (DIEV-T), and (2) a face-to-face post-election population survey carried out following the June 2018 elections (EI-T). The DIEV-T Incidents are manually coded from Turkey’s principal newspapers based on a coding scheme that covers a range of types of both electoral misconduct including the indicators that identify alleged partisan perpetrators. The post-electoral survey data are drawn from the Electoral Integrity in Turkey (EI-T) survey, carried out on a stratified random sample of 1,232 Turkish voters between 8 and 20 July. The survey included a range of questions on electoral integrity and electoral violence, including a question that asked respondents to assess the likelihood that different political actors might be involved in electoral violence.
It is hoped that, by utilizing above-described two alternative data collection methods (content analysis and cross-sectional data) and presenting the link between the phenomenon and general political functioning, this study contributes to the existing literature.
