Political Repression and Party Institutionalization

• In Event: Poster Session: Politics and History & International History and Politics
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Politics and History

Abstract

Often, scholars of party politics focus on traditional electoral strategies of party-building such as recruitment of members from home constituencies, territorial expansion through branches, engaging in open propaganda, and organizing professional electoral campaigns. However, when the opposition groups operate in environments that are hostile to party formation, traditional electoral strategies would be less viable. Specifically, when the opposition faces political repression in the form of exile, spying, and censorship, it allocates fewer resources to mass party-building and concentrates more on defensive strategies such as secret recruitment, the formation of underground cells, smuggling party propaganda materials, the use of encrypted communication techniques, and operating in exile. Even though such strategies allow the opposition to survive the repression, opposition becomes disconnected from the popular masses due to organizational secrecy and politics of exile. All else being equal, I hypothesize that defensive strategies impede the formation of the mass-mobilizing party machinery.

To test my theory and hypothesis, I focus on the late 19th century Ottoman Empire, an industrially underdeveloped, agrarian society with limited resources for mass mobilization. Specifically, I analyze the party-building activities of the Young Turks (1889-1908) who established the first organized opposition in the Ottoman Empire, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP). My analysis illustrates that the Young Turk opposition failed to build a robust party machinery inside the Ottoman borders due to political repression. To examine the causal effect of political repression, I exploit a natural experiment in which an exogenous European intervention in Ottoman Macedonia (provinces of Kosovo, Monastir, and Salonica) gradually ended Ottoman rule and rendered Sultan Abdülhamid's political repression ineffective between 1903-1908. The intervention created more conducive environment to party formation where the Young Turks built a mass-mobilizing party machinery and successfully executed the 1908 Constitutional Revolution. The revolution induced regime change as well as making the CUP the new incumbent in Ottoman politics.

I adopt a multi-method empirical strategy by blending the strengths of archival research and statistical analysis. To test my theory, I conduct a historically-minded within-case analysis of party formation and democratic consolidation. I rely on primary sources made up of more than 1500 documents on repression (305 spying reports, 513 censorship decisions, and 730 exile decrees) and CUP branches (1889-1908) and electoral performance (1908-1914). I use quantitative analysis to assess how exile, censorship, and spying impacted the party-building activities, specifically territorial expansion and political propaganda between 1889-1908. Finally, I exploit a natural experiment to test the causal effect of political repression on party-building.

I contribute to the literature on party formation and add to broader recent research on democratic consolidation. First, I extend the temporal boundaries of studies on Turkish democratization by consulting the historical record that largely ignored the legacies of repression. Second, I expand our understanding of how opposition in a traditional, industrially underdeveloped agrarian society, where resources for mass-mobilization were mostly absent, established a party organization. Hence, my analysis yields substantive theoretical insights beyond cases in Europe and Latin America. Last but not least, I offer a fresh perspective by developing the novel theoretical concept of defensive party formation.

Author

• Firat Kimya, Swarthmore College