Autocratisation in the Name of Democracy?! An Empirical Study of Turkish Citizens' Susceptibility to an Authoritarian Game of Deception

Just a few years ago, Turkey was considered a role model for the compatibility of Islam and Democracy. Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (JDP) were hailed as so-called Muslim democrats (Nasr 2005). By now, the euphoria is over: Turkey’s political system does not even fulfill the minimum requirements of democracy anymore. Oddly enough, Erdogan is still referring to “democracy” despite the country’s blatant democratic deficit. After implementing a new autocratic presidential system, he declared that Turkey had “given a lesson to the entire world on democracy” (Presidency of the Turkish Republic 2018). Erdogan tries to mask democracy’s authentic meaning by adding highly questionable modifiers such as “conservative” or “national” democracy (Arat-Koc 2018; Cinar/Sayin 2014). Most scholars agree that this attempt to redefine the D-Word is a game of deception. Autocrats intend to keep a democratic facade in order to add a patina of legitimacy to their claim to power (Lührmann/Lindberg 2018). But how do Turkish citizens perceive this game of deception? Do they fall into the trap of Erdogan’s propaganda? When it comes to the stability of political regimes, most advocates of the political culture paradigm would argue that this is the crucial question. From that theoretical perspective, citizens provide legitimacy for a political order (Fuchs 2007). Consensus often ends here and there is a controversy on how to measure support for democracies or autocracies in a reliable way. Confronted by autocrats that misappropriate the D-Word as a cosmetic image for their political agenda, scientist must ensure that their items capture more than lip services to democracy. Against this backdrop, we conceptually build upon studies that recommend analyzing citizen’s susceptibility for authoritarian notions of democracy (i.e. obedience to the unchecked authority of electorally uncontested or not seriously contested rulers) and overestimations of their political regime’s democratic qualities in order to tap into the legitimacy of authoritarian regimes (Kirsch/Welzel 2018; Kruse/Ravlik/Welzel 2018). We follow the line of these arguments and investigate the World Values Survey and the Varieties-of-Democracy Index to shed light on the following questions: (1) Do Turkish citizens support contradictory notions of democracy? (2) Do they perceive the political status quo as democratic while country experts point out that the very opposite is true? Our findings reveal that authoritarian notions of democracy, as well as satisfaction with the authoritarian status quo is rather the rule than the exception in Turkey. The susceptibility for the authoritarian game of deception is primarily a feature of religious individuals, supporters of patriarchal gender values, and the Justice and Development Party’s constituency. Given these results we conclude that the process of autocratization in Turkey has been paradoxically occurring in the name of democracy. In that sense, the label “Muslim democrats” seems to accurately unveil how the authoritarian turn of President Erdogan and the Justice and Development Party is still perceived as a democratic quest by its electoral base.