Electoral Malpractices in Turkey and their Impact on Political Regime

Turkey has had quite a long tradition of regular, competitive polls and multi-party democracy starting in 1946. However, in the last decade, with the consolidation of AKP’s grip on power there has been a growing concern about the integrity of elections. In subsequent elections the ruling party has resorted to a plethora of means inhibiting their competitiveness, distorting the “level playing field” by limiting the access of opposition parties to resources, be it media or financial and administrative assets as well as by manipulating the electoral regulations and procedures. Thus, the paper seeks to survey the extent of election malpractices in Turkey and address the following questions: Are elections in Turkey free, fair and competitive? What types of electoral malpractices can be identified in this state? Can we observe the change of their scope in subsequent elections? How does the state of elections in terms of their fairness and competitiveness influence the political system and political regime? The main hypothesis is that competitiveness limited by incumbents can in the long run become a factor deciding not only about the change within the political regime (e.g. loss of democratic quality) and but also change of the regime (to less democratic one). Turkey is in this context an example of so called “borderline regime”, which is balancing between hybrid and authoritarian regime of the new type but due to the increasing scope and variety of the electoral manipulations is approaching gradually the latter type. The paper has a strong theoretical underpinning, drawing on the vast scholarship on the theory of electoral integrity (e.g. S. Birch, P. Norris, A. Schedler and A. Simpser). The process-tracing method is used to investigate the main research questions.