Assessing Legitimation Claims of Authoritarian Regimes vis- `a-vis Crises: Evidence from Turkey

Authoritarian regimes engage in an enormous amount of public communication to legitimize their rule in the eyes of the population. Empirical evidence suggests that these legitimation claims are crucial to authoritarian regimes' survival. However, we do not have clear evidence on whether the content and intensity of these claims change when external shocks like crises challenge the regime. The lack of such evidence leaves the puzzle of how adaptive authoritarian public communication is as a gap. In this research, I aim to partially solve this puzzle by focusing on changes in the intensity and content of illiberal ideological claims of autocrats during and after the moments of crisis. Empirically, I focus on the competitive authoritarian regime of Turkey and analyze incumbent Recep Tayyip Erdogan's speeches before and after the failed coup attempt in July 2016. For the analysis, I create an original dataset of Erdogan's speeches using web scraping techniques (n = 1181). I measure the intensity of ideological legitimation in each speech using a dictionary-based quantitative text analysis and topic modeling approach. Using an interrupted time series analysis with segmented linear regressions, I assess both the gradual and immediate effects of the coup attempt and the intensity of ideological legitimation in Erdogan's speeches. The results suggest that the coup attempt has an immediate positive effect on ideological legitimation, but it does not have a significant gradual effect in the long run. Additionally, to measure the change in the content of ideological legitimation claims, I fit a word embedding model and identify the words with the highest increase in association with ideological terms after the coup. Results from this model suggest a substantial and long-lasting increase in the association between crisis terms and ideological terms after the coup. I interpret the combination of these results as evidence that crises transform the ideological propaganda of authoritarian regimes. More generally, the results suggest that autocrats' legitimation tools are not static, and they adapt to events in the external environment to some extent.