Political polarisation on social media: Competing understandings of democracy in Turkey

Heightened political polarisation threatens the stability of democratic institutions. While prior studies show that polarisation is evident in competing groups’ deployment of different terminology to describe the same topic, we emphasise polarisation can also be evident in groups’ attachment of different meanings to the same terminology. Competition for dominance in the public sphere is reflected in social media which become sites of contestation, showcasing antagonistic claims of legitimacy. We examine polarisation in the online political discursive field during the June 2019 rerun Istanbul elections in Turkey. We employed qualitative and computational methods to analyse approximately 116,000 tweets, focusing on political discussions around three interrelated prominent themes: “democracy,” “elections,” and “public service.” Twitter users did not simply associate the act of casting a vote with electing the candidate, but more importantly, they presented it as a competition over the future of democracy in Turkey.