Seçimli otoriterlikle mücadele: Türkiye ve Macaristan'da siyasi muhalefetin seçim stratejileri

Despite receiving increasing scholarly attention in recent times, the actions, preferences, and strategies of political opposition actors in contexts of autocratization remain understudied in comparative political science literature. This dissertation investigates the electoral strategies pursued by opposition parties in Turkey and Hungary, two prominent examples of electoral autocracy that have undergone a process of populist autocratization. Identifying cooperation and depolarization as two main strategic elements for winning elections against the populist autocrats in power, the dissertation seeks to uncover how opposition parties change their electoral strategies over the course of autocratization and particularly understand when they manage to cooperate and/or depolarize. An in-depth qualitative analysis of the electoral strategies of opposition parties during the process of autocratization in Turkey and Hungary reveals that the pursuit of these two strategies depends on the presence of incentivizing electoral institutions, the transformation of fault lines dividing both the opposition's bases and the broader society, and the existence of positive feedback from the latest experiences. These findings demonstrate that the evolution in the electoral strategies pursued by opposition parties over the course of autocratization mainly takes place through a process of political learning triggered by the transformative impact of unfolding regime change on the opposition parties' approach to the fault lines dividing their societies.