Opposition in Nondemocracies: Can They Make Credible Promises?

The recent literature on backsliding cases and authoritarian regimes has emphasized the role of information and the accompanying media controls in these countries. Yet, most of these studies focus on the media’s role in sharing information retrospectively on the incumbents such as on their corrupt behavior or economic performance. What about information provided by the opposition regarding their own prospective policy positions? Given that voters cannot reflect on their past performance at the national level, how can the opposition credibly make (policy) promises? Since even the most informed voters typically lack critical knowledge about the consequences of different policies in an environment of uncertainty, we argue that the opposition can make voters support their policy positions by providing information, but only under some conditions. We hypothesize that in a polarized context, information will only have an impact if the voters are already close to the opposition. In addition, we expect the effect of information to be strengthened by the voters’ experience with the opposition at the sub-national government and information on sub-national retrospective performance. With an experiment embedded in a face-to-face survey conducted with a probability sample prior to 2023 general elections, we test whether and how voters in Turkey update their policy positions after they receive some new information (treatment) in a vignette that presents it as opposition shared information. Since the campaign period took place right after the deadly February earthquakes, we focus on the opposition’s proposed earthquake preparedness policy. We indeed find that voters’ relative ideological position and experience with the opposition at the sub-national level condition the effect of information in the expected manner. Yet, the effect of information on retrospective performance seems more complicated.