Crises and Ideological Change in Authoritarian Regimes: Evidence From the July 2016 Coup Attempt in Turkey

In this study, I investigate how crises affect the ideological claims of authoritarian regimes. While existing studies emphasize the significance of ideological legitimation claims for the consolidation of authoritarian regimes, they do not examine whether the intensity and usage of these claims change after a crisis. I address this gap by utilizing the competitive authoritarian regime of Turkey before and after the July 2016 coup attempt. I use a novel dataset of President Erdoğan’s speeches and combine various text-as-data tools, including word embeddings, dictionary-based measures, and topic modeling, with an interrupted time series analysis. The results suggest that the coup attempt led to a short-term increase in the intensity of ideological claims and a long-lasting increase in the ideological framing of regime outsiders in Erdoğan’s speeches. These results demonstrate that crises transform the ideological claims of authoritarian regimes by reshaping how and to what extent such claims are used.