The impact of digital government platforms on normative regime support under autocracies: Experimental evidence from the CIMER platform in Turkey

How do electronic portals that enable direct online communications with the executive affect citizens’ attitudes toward authoritarian regimes? This paper examines the impact of different treatments related to CİMER - an electronic platform in Turkey that allows citizens to submit petitions and complaints, send messages to the president, and propose policies and programs - on various forms of normative support for authoritarianism. To estimate these effects on attitudinal and quasi-behavioral outcomes, we conducted an online survey experiment with a nationally representative sample. We hypothesize that such participatory institutions function not merely as instruments of service delivery, but also as political technologies that reinforce affective and emotional bonds between the regime (and its leader) with the citizenry, thereby strengthening normative support through affirmation and vindication among core constituencies. The results support the intuition that CIMER increases diffuse support for the regime even among opposition voters. Unexpectedly, however, the positive effect is focused on the regime institutions rather than Erdogan as the personalistic leader of the executive; on certain dimensions, CIMER even appears to backfire. This has major implications on the expected mid-term effects of these types of digital platforms on regime stability.