Abstract:

According to the legitimacy approach of political culture research the public’s approval of a particular regime and disapproval of its alternatives provide support for that regime. Both theoretical and empirical evidence suggest that this support is important for the legitimacy of the regime. This research attempts to map publics’ approval of democracy and disapproval of three regimes that are known to be alternatives of democracy by examining the three major political parties’, namely the Justice and Development Party (JDP), the Republican People’s Party (RPP) and the National Action Party (NAP), manifesto documents as well as their voter bases across the successive seventeen general elections in the modern Turkish political history. It employed quantitative research methods and the World Values Survey for individual level and Manifesto Project for party level data. Findings suggest that voters are more stable than their parties across time in terms of their pro-democratic stance. Also, that except for minor differences, support for democracy and each of three alternative of it occupy almost the identical places in the minds of the three party electorates. Moreover, in this picture, democracy is clearly viewed as an alternative to the three political regimes. In a causal relationship however, some important differences can be observed across parties when support for its alternatives are viewed as determinants of support for democracy. The last major finding suggests that these three political parties’ pro-democratic stances as identified in their manifesto documents do not represent their voters’ pro-democratic views.

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