Tweeting apart: Democratic backsliding, new party cleavage and changing media ownership in Turkey

Abstract

Turkey plunges headlong into democratic backsliding under Erdoğan’s presidency. The country was a forerunner in the decline of democratic standards in a decade from 2010 to 2020. In the first part of the article, we investigate how this democratic erosion suspends Turkey’s long-standing traditional party cleavage between religious conservatism and secularism. By tracing individuals who follow the members of the Turkish parliament on Twitter, we attach the deputies to their followers with the help of the correspondence analysis. We illustrate that, as the ethnic identity divide remains significant, democracy-authoritarianism cleavage becomes the main party split that brings the supporters of an ideologically diverse group of opposition parties closer. In the second part, we conceptualize the democracy-authoritarianism divide as the main cleavage in Turkish party politics after 2017 to shed light on how the AKP’s different tactics of capturing traditional media generated a partisan media landscape.