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Media Effects in a Polarized Political System: The Case of Turkey

Political Behavior (2023)Cite this article

Abstract

Can the media influence vote choice when the media and the party system are highly polarized, and vote shifts are infrequent? We argue affirmatively that media significantly influences vote choice even in such systems. First, we show that information filtered through the media has an independent effect on vote choice. Second, we link respondents’ newspaper choices in the pre-election survey with the favorability of major political parties in their newspapers during the campaign period. Third, we provide rich empirical data from media content and voter surveys. Our analyses suggest that media content has a significant effect in influencing party support and vote switches during the campaign periods of four general elections between 2002 and 2015 in the increasingly polarized setting of Turkey. We further break down this effect to study how favorable coverage and visibility influence party support differently among partisan loyalists and switchers.

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Data Availability

Replication material is available at Dataverse https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/M4YRVC.

Notes

  1. Alternatively, see Green and Gerber (2019) on canvassing effects by politicians that influence vote decisions.

  2. According to V-Dem data, Turkey showed the greatest increase in polarization since 2007, see https://www.v-dem.net/en/news/polarization-global-threat-democracy/.

  3. On recent discussions on (lack of) electoral volatility in Turkey, see Yardımcı-Geyikçi (2015).

  4. On the effects of online partisan media see Aral and Eckles (2019), Guess et al., (2021), and Zhuravskaya et al., (2020).

  5. On further erosion of Turkish democracy as a result of a failed coup attempt in summer 2016 see Çınar (2019).

  6. Media freedom continued to decline after 2015 and by 2018 Turkey ranked 163 in Freedom of the Press Index and 157 in Press Freedom Index.

    For details see: https://freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/FreedomofthePress_2015_FINAL.pdf and also https://rsf.org/en/ranking/2015.

  7. Details of the sample size and different types of attrition reasons are given in the supplementary information, Tables A.3 to A.6.

  8. In 2002 and 2007, the pre-election survey question was: “Which newspaper do you read most frequently?” while in 2011 and 2015, the question was rephrased to: “Which newspaper do you read most frequently for political news?”.

  9. For summary statistics, see Table A.1 in the supplementary information.

  10. This observed range is 0.60 in 2002, 1.228 in 2007, 1.348 in 2011 and 1.87 in 2015.

  11. An alternative specification in the supplementary information shows that modeling likelihood to switch is also similarly affected by both favorability and visibility together (Table A.8 and Fig. A.5).

  12. The full model specification is in the supplementary information (Table A.7).

  13. Furthermore, marginal effects of being a switcher is given in the supplementary information (Fig. A.4) and it also shows that media effects are heterogeneous across switchers and partisan loyalists.

  14. For further details, see Turkey Trends 2020 research report (7 January 2021), https://www.khas.edu.tr/sites/khas.edu.tr/files/inline-files/TEA2020_ENG_WEBRAPOR.pdf.

  15. In the supplementary information, see Figs. A.8 to A.11.

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Funding

Funding was provided by Türkiye Bilimsel ve Teknolojik Araştirma Kurumu (Grant No. TOVAG, 111K006, 2012).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of International Relations, Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey

    Ali Çarkoğlu

  2. Department of Political Science and Public Administration, Kadir Has University, Istanbul, Turkey

    Kerem Yıldırım

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  1. Ali Çarkoğlu
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  2. Kerem Yıldırım
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Correspondence to Kerem Yıldırım.

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Çarkoğlu, A., Yıldırım, K. Media Effects in a Polarized Political System: The Case of Turkey. Polit Behav (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-023-09867-w

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Keywords

  • Vote choice
  • Media
  • Persuasion
  • Polarization
  • Turkey