Update: 3/21/2014
In response to my emphasis of Erdogan’s popular mandate, Dr. Silverstein argued that we cannot accept the AKP’s performance in the general elections to reflect the popular mood given that many Turks did not go to vote (although actually, most did: the turnout was more than 83%–a participation rate that outshines most democracies by far). The implication was that many or most of the uncast ballots were from opponents of Erdogan or the AKP–perhaps many abstained from voting in protest.
My rejoinder was that we cannot know a lot about the sentiment of those who did not vote precisely because they did not vote: uncast ballots are epistemologically opaque. I went on to demonstrate how one could spin infinite narratives about why that segment of the electorate didn’t vote–one of the alternatives I listed was that many or most of those who didn’t vote actually supported the Prime Minister and his party but didn’t vote because the election was not going to be close, and they knew their party of choice would easily coast to victory without them.
It turns out that this was the case.
In the face of unprecedented scandal for the party, Turkey held municipal elections. As a result of the highly-charged political atmosphere, voter turnout was immense: 92% of eligible voters went to the polls. If Dr. Silverstein’s conjecture was correct and most of those who sat out of the previous elections were opposed to the AKP, then the party would have lost seats.
What happened?
In the last municipal elections (2009), the AKP won 38% of the vote. This time around, they won 45%– an increase of 7 percentage points (a relative increase of 18%)! This means that of those who sat out of the last municipal elections and participated this time, a disproportionately large share of those voters were actually AKP supporters.
Again, it seems as though a plurality of those who did not go to the polls in previous elections opted out of voting because they knew their favorite would win by wide margins. This time, they likely felt compelled to voice their support in the face of the scandals, protests, and other unrest caused by the political minorities in the interim.
The lesson is that low electoral turnout rates do not necessarily translate into a lack of public support. A second lesson follows from the first: those who presume to speak on behalf of the portion of electorate which has chosen to remain silent are typically hacks.
In this particular case, Dr. Silverstein’s has been caught brown-handed: his conjectures have been proven false. Insofar as he made his insinuations out of a poverty of evidence, he was spreading bullshit. But he is not alone. Much of the dialogue about the so-called “Arab Spring” has traded in this garbage.
In “The Numbers Game,” I argued that while much of the public international discourse takes for granted that most Syrians support the revolution, there is no empirical evidence to substantiate such claims, and overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
During Mursi’s tenure as president of Egypt, many pointed to the low turnout rates for the constitutional referendum as “proof” that most of the public rejected it (although many of these same people were strangely silent when the SCAF’s constitution was also passed with low turnout).
Unfortunately, one could produce examples ad-infinitum. Whenever a critical claim is offered up with little-to-no corroborating empirical evidence to support it, or especially when a lack of information is actually presented as evidence for a proposition, we are in the realm of nonsense.
Final Note on the Municipal Elections
Astonishingly, there are many who attempt to look at the municipal elections as a sign that Erdogan and the AKP are growing weaker. This narrative is extremely problematic.
Most who try to make this leap do so by comparing the AKPs performance in the 2011 general election (more than 50%) to their lower performance in the municipal ones (45%).
The problem with such a comparison is that political alliances/allegiances and priorities are different for municipal than general elections—a fact that is just a true in the U.S. as it is in Turkey. Again, by an apples-to-apples comparison of the most recent municipal elections to the last ones (2009)—there was a relative increase in the AKPs vote share by more than 18%.
In the midst of these scandals, etc. no one was predicting this sort of a showing (seriously, review the articles written prior to the elections in Turkey): the AKP was saying their victory point would be to break even; the opposition and most analysts were assuming they would lose some seats as well—but not only did they hold all their positions, they increased their margins. Just as, in the general elections, they have increased their margins every time. Make no mistake, this was an unabashed victory for the Prime Minister.
Those who are expecting a big upset for Erdogan and his party in the coming general elections based on misreading the municipal results will be equally surprised when he coasts to the presidency in a landslide, and when the AKP (and its political coalition) likely maintains or even increases its share in the next election.
The forces that propel Erdogan and weaken the opposition are calcifying, not weakening. And the AKPs coalition is far from being in jeopardy, despite the negligible losses (.2% of the electorate) resultant from the Gulen split. The voting population in Turkey is likely far less polarized than many external media suggest, as I have frequently argued.
There is no meaningful opposition, as Erdogan himself has noted. And he uses the specter of significant opposition to reinforce his own position: the more visible they are, the more easily he can rally people around him and tout his democratic mandate in defiance of the usurpers. For opponents of the PM, it is a vicious circle.
Again, a careful reading of the stats shows that a disproportionate share of people who sat out of the last municipal elections and participated this time in the face of the scandals etc. were Erdogan’s supporters, not enemies. At this point, the louder his opponents get, the stronger it makes him.
This is part of the reason I fear the opposition may seek to avail themselves of the deep state in order to accomplish what they could not through the ballot—a mistake which has been made frequently in recent years, most notably in Egypt.
Of course, none of this is to endorse the current state of affairs, nor to deny egregious wrongdoing by the Erdogan Administration–but I fear it may be empirically problematic/ hasty to assert that he is in any real electoral danger.