Abstract:

The political polarization, populist discourses and development of risk society inside the global context have been causing damages on electoral integrity and legitimacy. Domestic election monitoring is a necessity in order to establish a fair, secure and transparent election process. In Turkey, there is one domestic monitoring organization, Vote and Beyond and a few non-governmental organizations trying to observe elections. Elections in Turkey have not been analyzed around the concept of electoral integrity and citizens are not aware of domestic monitoring. The aim of this paper is to present the concept of electoral integrity and underline the importance of domestic monitoring, especially in politically divided societies. Our two key questions for this article are: “how can domestic monitoring organizations help to establish electoral integrity and legitimacy in Turkey?”, “what are the ideas of volunteers at Vote and Beyond on electoral integrity in Turkey?” According to these questions, this article aims to analyze the activities of Vote and Beyond aiming to develop electoral knowledge of Turkish people and legitimacy of the elections in Turkey and the impact of volunteers working within this NGO. Our analysis will be based on in-depth interviews with the founders and a pilot study of a survey realized with volunteers of Vote and Beyond. The first argument relies on the idea that social and political polarization and the development of global risks by populist and post-truth politics have negative impacts on electoral integrity. And the second argument is that election malpractices encourage more and more citizens to participate in election observation in order to prevent fraud and corruption during the elections. Within this approach, the article aims to make a theoretical and empirical contribution to electoral studies in Turkey.

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