Routes to Collective Action among Opposition Voters: Testing Efficacy, Anger and Injustice in Turkey's Repeated Elections

Abstract

Political elections can set the scene for strong political identifications and increased motivation for collective action (Turner-Zwinkels & van Zomeren, 2020). This can take the form of institutional or conventional collective action such as membership to political parties, joining political party rallies or protest voting (Otjes et al., 2019), but it can also take noninstitutional and unconventional forms such as street protests, and raising voice collectively. Indeed, as recently exemplified in the sustained post-election protests of opposition voters against the authoritarian Belarus regime, unsatisfied by the election results or disagreed with the newly elected government's policies, opposition voters can mobilize with the goal of demonstrating dissent and pursuing social change (Tucker, 2007). However, less is known about what determines the routes to collective action in a post-election period from the side of opposition voters.We thus focused on opposition voters in Turkey in a post-election period, and we sought to test a social identity model of collective action whereby a (politicized) social identity is associated with stronger anger and efficacy feelings and in turn collective action (van Zomeren et al., 2004;van Zomeren, Postmes, & Spears, 2008). We went beyond previous research on collective action in several ways. First, rather than focusing on a single social identity, we focused on contextually-relevant diverse political identifications that correspond to existing cleavages in Turkey, i.e., leftist, secular and liberal (Baysu & Phalet, 2017).Second, we tested this model in two studies that immediately followed the repeated Parliamentary elections of 2015. Turkey's 2015 repeated election cycle presented a unique context for testing the role of changing dynamics between identity, anger, and efficacy for collective action. Specifically, the first election that took place on 7 June resulted in the ruling party's majority loss in the parliament, potentially giving a sense of efficacy for opposition voters. However, under the pretext of the parliamentary failure to form a political