Research Coffee with Pelin Ayan Musil

Research Coffee is a series of events aimed to be a platform for discussions about publications, projects, and working papers of AAU Faculty as well as AAU students. Prior registration is required for this event.

Our next session will be hosted by Pelin Ayan Musil, Ph.D. who will present his work “Understanding the Formation of Oppositional Alliances against Populist-Authoritarian Governments: The Cases of Hungary and Turkey”. Alexei Anisin, Ph.D. will join us as the discussant of the paper.

You can find the abstract of the paper below, but to receive the full paper and the link to the meeting, please register in advance. We look forward to seeing you!

Abstract:
The existing literature includes a substantial gap in understanding the change that each individual party goes through while joining an oppositional alliance against populist authoritarian governments. This paper aims to fill this gap, and as opposed to the existing explanations, underlines the significance of the agential factors in the process of forming an oppositional alliance. It shows that each party, first, has to gradually transform into an anti-system party, and second, legitimize its relationship to other opposition parties (even those with extremist platforms), using a meta-political discourse. This paper presents this framework based on a most-different-system analysis of Hungary and Turkey: Despite differences in their economic and cultural backgrounds, the opposition parties in these countries managed to form an alliance within the aforementioned framework and remove the populist-authoritarian incumbents from mayoral office in the local elections held in Budapest and Istanbul. The empirical analysis is based on data from interviews conducted with opposition activists and experts from both countries as well as the public statements of mayoral candidates in each election.