Economic Voting and Media Influence in a Competitive Authoritarian Setting: Evidence from Turkey

Alper Yagci and Cem Oyvat

No 23687, Greenwich Papers in Political Economy from University of Greenwich, Greenwich Political Economy Research Centre

Abstract: It is generally assumed that individuals take national economic performance into account while voting. But the question of how perceptions about the economy may be influenced by partisan media remains understudied. Analyzing survey data from Turkey with various robust analysis techniques we demonstrate that reliance on pro government media as a news source makes voters’ economic perceptions significantly more favorable, which in turn increases the likelihood of incumbent vote. In addition, we demonstrate that the audience of pro-government media are more likely to display “sociotropic overestimation”—thinking that the national economy has done better compared to their own household experience; and “counterfactual rationalization”—thinking, regardless of how they view actual economic performance, that it could be worse under alternative leadership. The results suggest that when the economy is manifestly deteriorating, authoritarian incumbents may try to use media influence to convince the electorate that the status quo is better than the alternatives.

Keywords: Economic voting; media; competitive authoritarianism; Turkey; political behavior; political economy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-12-03
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/23687/3/SSRN-id3295038%20%287%29.pdf
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 401 Unauthorized (http://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/23687/3/SSRN-id3295038%20%287%29.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/23687/3/SSRN-id3295038%20%287%29.pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gpe:wpaper:23687

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Greenwich Papers in Political Economy from University of Greenwich, Greenwich Political Economy Research Centre Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Nadine Edwards ().