Political polarisation on social media: Competing understandings of democracy in Turkey
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Date
2022
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Journal Title
Journal ISSN
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Publisher
Routledge Journals, Taylor & Francis Ltd
Abstract
Heightened political polarisation threatens democratic stability. While prior studies find polarisation in competing groups' deployment of different terminologies to describe the same topic, we emphasise that it can also be evident in groups' attachment of different meanings to the same terminology. Competition for dominance in the public sphere is reflected in social media which become sites of contestation, showcasing antagonistic claims of legitimacy. In a case-study of the June 2019 rerun Istanbul elections in Turkey, we used qualitative and computational methods to analyse approximately 116,000 tweets, focusing on discussions around the themes of 'democracy', 'elections', and 'public service'. Twitter users associated the act of casting a vote not only with electing the candidate, but also with a competition over the future of Turkish democracy.
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Keywords
Parties, Mobilization, Engagement, Populism, Protest, Crisis, Turkish politics, elections, Parties, 2019 Istanbul elections, Mobilization, political discourse, Engagement, Twitter, Populism, computational text analysis, Protest, hashtag analysis, Crisis, public service
Turkish CoHE Thesis Center URL
Citation
1
WoS Q
Q1
Scopus Q
Q1
Source
South European Society and Politics
Volume
27
Issue
2
Start Page
223
End Page
251