Talk:
“The de-objectification of electoral results in Turkey. Insights from electoral nights since the 2010s”
by
Elise Massicard
French National Center for Scientific Research / Centre d’Etudes Internationales
elise.massicard@sciencespo.fr
Date and Room Info
Monday, May 4, 2026, 12:30 p.m.
A-130
Abstract
Since the mid-2010s, the announcement of election results in Turkey after the closing of the polls has produced strange scenes, with different channels announcing divergent partial results, before these converge a few hours later – sometimes even a few days. These repeated episodes have made many people wonder which figures are true, suspect that election results are manufactured and question how they are, and by whom. This presentation analyzes how the production of temporary results has become part of the electoral struggle itself and traces the processes by which conflicting tallies have spread, especially focusing on (1) the polarization of the media field; and (2) growing mobilizations by citizens, NGOs, and parties to engage in the checking of official tallies or even the autonomous production of electoral results. It questions the political effects of this de-objectification, and the relation with the loss of trust in the election results.
Short Bio
Elise Massicard is a permanent senior research fellow at the French National Center for Scientific Research / Centre d’Etudes Internationales, Sciences Po Paris. From 2010 to 2014, she was a research fellow at the French Institute of Anatolian Studies in Istanbul. She was also a visiting fellow at the University of California at Berkeley (2009) and at Northwestern University (2019). Her research focuses on the political sociology of contemporary Turkey, especially social movements, political parties, state-society relations, government practices, identity politics, everyday politics, and elections. She has authored Street-Level Governing. Negotiating the State in Urban Turkey (Stanford UP, 2022), and The Alevis in Turkey and Europe: Identity and Managing Territorial Diversity (Routledge, 2012). She has co-edited with Nicole Watts Negotiating Political Power in Turkey: Breaking up the Party (Routledge, 2013) and with Marc Aymes and Benjamin Gourisse, Order and Compromise. Government Practices in Turkey from the Late Ottoman Empire to the Early 21st Century (Brill, 2015). She has published extensively in academic journals. She is a founding member of the Consortium for European Symposia on Turkey (http://cest-turkey.org/)