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During the last decade the agenda of local and global politics is heavily marked by the encounter of two powerful currents, namely democracy and political Islam. On the one hand Islam as a religion itself is facing a cultural dialectic between a modern and an authentic form, producing a synthesis which is only to be criticized again by a new radical antithesis. Within that framework political Islam is perceived to be a tool for this current antithesis, attacking the states for impiety and materialism. Democracy, on the other hand, is becoming dominant as a criterion of good government, the "only game in town", with its inherent complexity which reveals itself in each particular context. The two currents are not necessarily irreconcilable, but they produce a number of different effects on each other whenever they meet. The fundamental contention of this article is to demonstrate this relationship within the Turkish setting.

The freedom of media is an essential component for democratic settings; however, in some contexts, citizens experience several barriers to enjoy this right in full. Replacing conventional media channels, social media is becoming an indispensable medium to express and discuss politics in such environments. Yet, there is little consensus in the literature about how social media relates to offline political participation, especially in settings where citizens do not experience media freedom in full. By using survey data that has been collected after the Turkish general election of 2018, this article aims to display the relationship between social media use and offline political participation. The analysis reveals offline political participation is related to sharing political views online and exposure to alternative political ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent work on elections in unconsolidated democracies and electoral authoritarian states has identified violence a problem that commonly afflicts electoral processes. Yet there is still little understanding of citizen reactions to violent acts and how voters attribute blame for attacks, intimidation, forceful obstruction of campaign activities and other violations of electoral peace. This paper aims to add to the growing micro-level literature on the dynamics of electoral violence by providing evidence of factors that shape regional heterogeneity in reactions to this phenomenon. Taking as our frame of reference the 2018 Turkish presidential elections, we probe the role of party identification and region of residence in conditioning blame attribution, separately and in combination. We find that the process of blame attribution is shaped by party identification, but that this effect is highly dependent on the regional context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The unfettered expression of electoral choice is an important democratic right; however, in many contexts voters are pressured by others to cast their votes in certain ways. Electoral coercion is a topic that has received increased attention from researchers in recent years as part of the wave of research on electoral violence, yet there is little consensus in the literature as to who the targets of coercion are most likely to be. This article uses a list experiment embedded in a survey fielded following the Turkish general election of 2018 to identify the targets of coercive electoral practices within families and among close friends. The analysis reveals familial electoral coercion to be strongly conditioned by partisanship and disadvantaged demographic characteristics, but finds no evidence that women are more likely than men to be coerced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the academic literature on negative campaigning is growing, more research is needed to contribute to the theoretical and empirical knowledge on the phenomenon. Accordingly, this article examines the impact of negative political messages on political trust in Turkey. The findings indicate that although exposure to negativity alters the trust level of the citizens, this impact is not uniform and dependent on party identifications. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]