Who Leaves a Dominant Party? Elite Defection Under Competitive Authoritarianism

In almost any regime context, the choice to defect from the party in government risks political marginalization and economic repercussions. In competitive authoritarian regimes, elite defections should be diminishingly rare when a dominant party controls the distribution of economic benefits and enjoys what Levitsky and Way (2010) call “an uneven playing field,” due to unequal access to resources, media, and the law. Yet, in Turkey, where the ruling AKP is exactly this kind of dominant party, over a hundred party elites defected to the opposition in 2019-2020. This article leverages eight years of social media data—over 10 million Tweets produced by 841 political elites between 2014 and 2021—to analyze the political networks and sentiment of those who left and those who stayed. This research uses network analysis to map the political coalitions of these party elites. Almost every Turkish politician has been an active user of Twitter since its introduction in the country in 2011. Network analysis tools utilize shared connections—here, the frequency of liked Tweets shared between users—to determine how “close” and how “far” individuals are from each other. This social affinity allows us to observe when future defectors first began to distance themselves from the party, and in reaction to what events. I use machine learning to develop language models capable of measuring Tweets on three dimensions: liberal democracy, institutional democracy, and economic sentiment. These models are designed to detect language patterns, for example, whether political elites praise journalists for providing accountability and information, or whether they accuse journalists of being tools for outside forces and condone putting them in jail. This step makes it possible to test whether individuals who publicly express commitments to key democratic principles are more likely to leave the AKP. The results indicate that defections were a backlash against regime personalization. Elites who defected began to distance themselves from Erdogan shortly after he institutionalized a personalist regime. Their likes on Twitter also indicate a dissatisfaction with the weakening of parliament and intra-party committees, key democratic institutions that also facilitate their access to power. They do not, however, appear to be motivated by more liberal democratic principles like media freedom. Defections from a dominant party can challenge the stability of authoritarian regimes. While economic incentives have been identified as important explanatory factors for defections from dominant parties ( Reuter and Gandhi 2011), the motivations for defection are not solely limited to political economic considerations. Even when political and economic incentives mitigate against it, defections still occur, and sometimes in large numbers. This research shows that the personalization of power presents risks to the cohesion of the ruling coalition in electoral autocracies. Institutions that facilitate shared agenda-setting produce buy-in that is not easily replaced by a leader’s charisma. Undermining such institutions can cause some elites to push back. Therefore, a fuller calculus that accounts for the interaction between elites’ institutional preferences and their economic considerations is important for understanding whether electoral authoritarian regimes remain resilient against elite defections.