Political Geography, Intergroup Conflict, and Support for Democracy

• In Event: Democracy and Identity Politics

Abstract

How and when does political geography impede public commitment to democratic practices and norms concerning ethnic and racial minorities? In this paper, I argue that spatial distance and minority groups’ level of residential segregation impede majority group members’ willingness to act as a safeguard against violation of democratic practices and norms at the local level by heightening intergroup conflict and bias. To assess my theoretical considerations, I propose an online survey experiment with a target sample of Turkish citizens using Forthright. The setting of my study is Turkey, a hybrid authoritarian regime dominated by two major cleavages across ethnic and religious lines. Turkey provides a unique opportunity to explore my research question. The ethnic conflict between the majority ethnic group Turks and the largest minority ethnic group Kurds is a major cleavage in Turkey, which has been constantly exploited by political elites both historically and today. More specifically, I propose an abstracted experimental design in which I use what I call “geographic location cards” to manipulate the spatial distance/degree of segregation and ethnic identity of the opposition group undemocratically targeted by the government. The proposed design extends and modifies an early design used by Farley and colleagues (1994) to study White and Black housing preferences in the US. The abstracted nature of the design enables me to mitigate social desirability bias that raises a major problem in public opinion research in authoritarian regimes (Truex 2019). By focusing on the subnational dynamics of democracy, this paper illustrates how the proliferation of local democratic institutions and practices in hybrid authoritarian regimes can paradoxically hurt the representation of marginalized groups through the toleration of undemocratic behavior by ordinary citizens conditional on political geography and intergroup conflict. The paper also emphasizes the importance of racial and ethnic identity for the study of public support for democracy. From a methodological perspective, the abstracted experimental design seeks to quantify different dimensions of space. This design not only allows for the exploration of the relatively underexplored effects of geographic space but also provides a framework for experimental researchers interested in examining the intersection of local context and racial and ethnic politics beyond the case of Turkey.

Author

• Burcu Kolcak, Rutgers University