This article sheds light on the factors that pave the way from voter abstention to voter turnout based on extensive research of tweets on national and local elections in Turkey. We find that the negative campaign strategy of the incumbent and the fact that the campaigning process has taken place on a very uneven playing field have triggered a set of emotions, primarily moral outrage and anger among the electorate, which have the power to change voting patterns in a significant way. The effect of negative campaigning on expressive voting was further enhanced by the pulling effect of the candidates and their public supporters and endorsements. We found that other, competing explanations of political outcomes are secondary to the mechanisms above.

Despite a growing body of literature on the advancement of autocratic tactics and toolkits in competitive authoritarian regimes (CARs), we lack sufficient knowledge on the strategies that the opposition builds against populist-authoritarian governments. Using two top autocratizing cases – Turkey and Hungary – this article singles out ‘transnationalization’ as one such novel strategy. ‘Transnationalization’ is defined as a strategy through which opposition-led subnational executives transform local and global boundaries by consciously forming a link with the liberal-democratic world in order to expand their space for manoeuvre. Conducting a qualitative content analysis of the Istanbul and Budapest mayors' international Twitter accounts and using evidence from elite interviews with officials from Istanbul and Budapest municipalities, we demonstrate the material, symbolic and political means of this strategy and the rationalist and normative motivations behind it. By discussing the what, how and why of a transnationalization strategy, we fill an important gap in the scholarship regarding opposition strategies in CARs.

This article looks at different strategies in which authoritarianism operated in relation to the redesign of Skopje during the rule of the conservative party VMRO-DPMNE and its leader Nikola Gruevski. It argues that the promoters of the urban project called “Skopje 2014” relied on a set of nondemocratic mechanisms and involvement and coordination of various individuals and institutions on all levels to implement and legitimize the project and expand its political dominance. These ranged from state-driven mechanisms and urban design strategies to contributions of non-state groups, thus demonstrating a systematic effort behind the makeover of Skopje. Examining the project through the concept of authoritarianism, the article goes beyond (methodological) nationalism to understand the complexity of the revamp of North Macedonia’s capital. It also demonstrates how the party used its ideological principles to leave its enduring mark on Skopje’s urban environment. Additionally, the article points out the need to study urban space politics in the context of hybrid and competitive authoritarian regimes.

The attempt to classify Bolivia under Evo Morales has yielded a bewildering range of regime labels. While most scholars label it a democracy with adjectives, systematic appraisals of the regime have been scant. This article aims fill this gap by providing a more systematic evaluation, putting special emphasis on features of Bolivia’s electoral playing field. It evaluates the slope of key fields of competition (electoral, legislative, judicial, and mass media), finding abundant evidence that all four were substantively slanted in favor of the incumbent. During the MAS reign, political competition was genuine but fundamentally unfree and unfair, because the ruling party benefited from a truncated supply of electoral candidates; much greater access to finance; a partisan electoral management body; supermajorities in the legislature, used to dispense authoritarian legalism; a captured and weaponized judiciary; and a co-opted mass media ecosystem. Contrary to most extant characterizations, the regime is best categorized as competitive authoritarian.

How does support for opposition parties grow in dominant party systems? Most scholarship on the rise of competitive elections in dominant party regimes focuses on elite defections from the ruling party and coordination by opposition parties as key explanations, but there is less focus on how politics at the local level contributes to opposition victories. This article argues that effective service delivery in local government helps opposition parties grow support in local elections. Examining the case of the Democratic Alliance (DA) in South Africa, this article provides a systematic analysis of local elections and opposition party performance. Using an original data set of electoral, census and spatial data at the lowest electoral unit in South Africa (the ward), this article shows that in the areas where it is the incumbent party, support for the DA grows as the delivery of basic services to non-white households improves, and when DA-run wards outperform the neighbouring ones run by the ruling African National Congress party, support for the DA increases in neighbouring wards. Overall, this study contributes to our understanding of how local politics erode dominant party rule.

This article argues that Turkey’s contemporary political regime is competitive authoritarianism. Tracing the evolution of Turkey’s political system from tutelary democracy to its current state, it describes the developments that resulted in the dissolution of the army’s prerogatives in politics and the rise of a new form of authoritarianism in the country. Associating this substantive change with the global emergence of competitive authoritarianism, I argue that the competitive authoritarian regime of Turkey has been institutionalized by the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) and that, since the 2017 referendum, the regime has displayed a tendency toward full authoritarianism that may render elections non-competitive by narrowing the legal channels through which the opposition can contest for political power.

Scholarly attention has increasingly shifted from diminished subtypes of democracy to hybrid regimes, particularly competitive authoritarianism. Such regimes retain democracy’s formal features while failing to meet its minimum standards. When properties of distinct concepts like democracy and authoritarianism are combined, however, confusion, inaccuracy, and mischaracterization of cases may occur. By disaggregating political systems into electoral institutions, surrounding rights and freedoms, constitutionalism, and the rule of law, this article complicates the binary distinction between a midrange definition of democracy and competitive authoritarianism. A number of Andean cases are found to fall on the spectrum of defective democracies between these categories. Defective democracies break down when rulers violate the conditions necessary for institutionalized alternation in power by means of public participation and loyal opposition in an electoral regime. Given leaders’ reliance on electoral legitimacy, however, even defective democracies may prove surprisingly resilient.

This study explores whether and how exposure to mass media affects regime support in competitive authoritarian regimes. Using geographical and temporal variation in newspaper circulation and radio signal strength in South Korea under Park Chung Hee's competitive authoritarian rule (1961–1972), we find that greater exposure to media was correlated with more opposition to the authoritarian incumbent, but only when the government's control of the media was weaker. When state control of the media was stronger, the correlation between media exposure and regime support disappeared. Through a content analysis of newspaper articles, we also demonstrate that the regime's tighter media control is indeed associated with pro-regime bias in news coverage. These findings from the South Korean case suggest that the liberalizing effect of mass media in competitive authoritarian regimes is conditional on the extent of government control over the media.

Leading theories of transitions from single-party dominant systems begin with economic crisis, the party's loss of patronage resources, and elite-level defections. The multiparty elections that are then held exert no independent effect, but instead register neutrally the party's decline and the democratization of politics. This article, however, shifts attention from the dominant party to citizens and elections in noncrisis conditions. It argues that citizens assess on key dimensions the dominant party's legitimacy or worthiness of support. Further, where they grow critical of its policy outputs, they scrutinize more closely its conformity to procedures. And as they anticipate that their voting preferences will be thwarted by electoral manipulations, they vote in protest, perhaps producing a “liberalizing electoral outcome.” Elections, then, do not simply indicate the dominant party's decline. By deepening alienation, they help citizens to cause it. Analysis is set in Malaysia, long an exemplar of single-party dominance, but recently a case in which the government was dealt a striking electoral setback.