Essays on the Relationship between Political Representation and Protest Behavior

In my dissertation, while investigating the protest behavior of survey respondents from European countries and Turkey, I dedicate considerable attention to examining the connection between elections and protests and their effects on political representation.

In the first chapter of my dissertation, I explore whether protests can serve as a complement or substitute for elections in response to the inefficiency of the latter to provide equal levels of representation to diverse voices. To epitomize the unequal levels of representation, I measure the ideological incongruence between governments and individuals. Building on previous studies, which only refer to the complementary role of protests, I find protesting can also substitute elections for non-voters as a response to increasing representational deprivation. In the further direction of this research, I focus on the effect of strong institutions in increasing political opportunities, thereby making protests another tool for influencing policymaking.

In the second chapter, I examine the role of parties in shaping their voters’ protest behavior. I argue that the government status of individuals’ preferred political parties does not solely define these individuals’ level of representation and democratic satisfaction. In addition to the parties’ government status, their size signals their capability to affect decision-making. Therefore, I differentiate parties according to their seat shares, which may better capture their voters’ majority and minority status. In that regard, I show that the voters of smaller parties in government coalitions protest more than those supporting senior parties since their preferences are not equally represented. Moreover, a comparison between government and opposition party voters suggests that the real losers of politics are supporters of smaller opposition parties as these parties cannot have a policy influence in decision-making.

In the third chapter, I seek to demonstrate the preferability of protest as a form of political participation compared to the most conventional and institutional form of participation, the act of voting, by manipulating individuals’ protest participation potentials in different election timeframes through an experimental setting. I secured funding from the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Türkiye (TUBITAK) 1002 – Short Term R&D Funding Program to conduct this experiment. This funding enabled me to complete an online survey involving 1250 participants from Turkish voters. I plan to submit the preliminary findings of this survey to a reputable journal as a pre-registered report.