The De- and Re-Democratization (DRD) Workgroup of the CEU Democracy Institute cordially invites you to its next Rooftop Seminar.
If you would like to attend, please register here.
Please keep in mind that external guests cannot enter the building without prior registration. Due to space restrictions, attendance is limited. We ask registered visitors to pick up their temporary visiting card at the reception. The event is not open to the press.
Abstract:
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. 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.
The paper is available upon request from the author.
Speaker:
Dean Schafer, post-doctoral research fellow at the CEU Democracy Institute, completed his PhD at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. His research focuses on the values and incentives that shape coalition building in backsliding democracies. Broadly, his interests include political economy, comparative democracy and autocracy, and data science methods. He scrapes social media data to get leverage on the attitudes, networks, and behavior of political elites, which is especially useful in hard-to-observe settings such as authoritarian countries. His work has been published in Party Politics, South European Society and Politics, and Nationalities Papers, as well as public-facing outlets including The Democracy Paradox and Foreign Policy in Focus.
Discussant:
Melis Laebens is Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science of Central European University. Her research centers on democratic backsliding, political parties and electoral behavior, and spans several regions. Her book manuscript, entitled Incumbents Against Democracy, analyzes the conditions under which democratically elected incumbents can gradually take over democratic institutions and establish authoritarian control over those without abolishing elections or legislatures. Much of her published work to date focuses on democratic backsliding and party politics in Turkey, but she has also studied other cases, such as Ecuador, Colombia and Poland, in detail. Currently, she is researching how a challenge against democratic institutions by elected incumbents, and resulting damage to democratic institutions, transform the political landscape. She studies this question in Turkey, where she uses survey research to understand electoral behavior and changing political attitudes, and in Poland, where she is carrying out mixed method research to understand the changes in the electoral arena under consecutive United Right governments.
Chair:
Zsuzsanna Szelényi is the Program Director of the CEU Democracy Institute Leadership Academy, a foreign policy specialist, and the author of ‘Tainted Democracy, Viktor Orbán and the Subversion of Hungary’. Before joining the CEU Democracy Institute, Szelényi worked as a Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy. She was also a Fellow of the IWM’s Europe’s Futures program, focusing on autocratization within the European Union. In 2012, Szelényi co-founded the opposition party ‘Together’ and served as a Member of Parliament in Hungary from 2014 to 2018. During her tenure, she addressed foreign policy, migration, and constitutional affairs. With extensive experience in promoting democracy, Szelényi worked at the Council of Europe from 1996 to 2010, focusing on democracy development in Europe, including conflict regions like the Western Balkans and the Caucasus. From 2010 to 2012, she collaborated with international organizations in North Africa and Central and Eastern Europe. She began her career as a member of the liberal Fidesz party in 1988 and served as a Member of Parliament from 1990 until her departure from politics in 1994 to pursue a professional career. Szelényi holds a GMAP in International Politics and Economics from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, as well as MAs in Psychology from the University of Eotvos Lorand and International Relations from Corvinus University.