Narrow Responses to Social Movements: Evidence from Turkey’s Gezi Protests

Abstract

ABSTRACT Research on the outcomes of major protests indicates that opposition parties tend to respond with a combination of support and negligence. This article suggests a novel mechanism through which opposition parties maintain this balancing act. Based on an original dataset of interventions in the Turkish Parliament around the 2013 Gezi Protests, I argue that representatives from two left-wing opposition parties supported the movement, but in narrow and even contradictory ways. The Kemalist opposition party CHP emphasised identity markers of the activists but downplayed the issues raised in the protests, while the pro-Kurdish BDP did the opposite. I argue that such narrow issue-centered or actor-centered responses reflected a strategy to simultaneously placate core supporters – Turkish nationalists and Kurdish voters – while giving the impression of being fully supportive of the movement as a whole. One implication of this study is that broad-based movements may be a mixed blessing for democratisation, as they enable opposition parties to cherry-pick their favourite aspects of the protests. Parties may explicitly support a movement but simultaneously deflect attention away from the core issues protesters raise or amplify a narrow set of their pre-established positions.