Incumbent Tactics and Opposition Strategies: Executive Aggrandizement and Mass Mobilization in Tunisia and Turkey

Autocratization has been on the rise across the globe. In fact, the world is going through a third wave of autocratization (Lührmann and Lindberg 2019). A rich body of literature has examined the tactics employed by incumbents (or would-be autocrats) to remain in office (Bermeo 2016; Haggard and Kaufman 2020). An emerging body of literature has turned attention to how the strategies employed by opposition groups facilitate or abort autocratization (Gamboa 2022; Tomini et al. 2023; Somer et al. 2021). The paper theorizes that outsider and insider incumbents pursue different autocratization tactics which aim to shape the strategies adopted by opposition groups. While outsider incumbents employ executive aggrandizement and mobilization in parallel, insider incumbents use them in a sequence with executive aggrandizement in the early stages of autocratization and mass mobilization later on. Autocratization led by outsider incumbents, thus, happens in a rapid form giving opposition groups little leeway to abort the process, whereas insider-led autocratization unfolds slowly over time giving the opposition more opportunities for resistance. The paper uses the cases of Tunisia and Turkey to demonstrate this logic. Both cases represent the outsider-insider distinction. They are, however, similar along many dimensions including the lines of social cleavages in society. In doing so, the paper highlights how the status of the incumbents matters for the autocratization strategies used and later for how the opposition responds (or not) to autocratization.