Coup Attempt Intensified Erdoğan’s Ideological Rhetoric and Outsider Framing

What The Study Asks

Why do authoritarian regimes change the way they talk after a crisis? Mehmet Yavuz investigates whether and how a shock—the July 2016 coup attempt in Turkey—altered the intensity and targets of ideological claims by an authoritarian leader.

Why This Matters

Authoritarian rulers rely on ideological claims to legitimize rule and neutralize opponents, but existing work rarely asks whether those claims shift in tone or target after acute crises. Understanding these shifts matters for evaluating how crises help regimes adapt, consolidate support, and reframe political opponents.

How the Question Is Studied

Yavuz analyzes a novel dataset of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s speeches before and after the July 2016 coup attempt in Turkey’s competitive authoritarian context. The study combines multiple text-as-data tools with an interrupted time series design to detect changes tied to the coup shock:

• Word embeddings to capture shifts in semantic associations;
• Dictionary-based measures to quantify the intensity of ideological language;
• Topic modeling to identify changes in thematic emphasis;
• Interrupted time series analysis to assess immediate and persistent changes after the July 2016 event.

Key Findings

• The coup attempt produced a short-term spike in the overall intensity of ideological claims in Erdoğan’s speeches.
• More importantly, the speeches show a durable increase in the ideological framing of regime outsiders—opponents and rival groups were more frequently cast in explicitly ideological terms after the coup.
• These patterns suggest crises do not merely inflame rhetoric temporarily; they can recalibrate how regimes construct and target ideological narratives over the long run.

Implications for Research and Practice

The results show that crises reshape not only how much authoritarian leaders invoke ideology but also whom ideology is used against. For scholars of authoritarianism and political communication, this implies that shocks can produce durable discursive realignments that help regimes justify repression, mobilize supporters, or delegitimize opponents. Policymakers and analysts tracking authoritarian resilience should therefore pay attention to post-crisis shifts in rhetoric as signals of strategic adaptation.