ABSTRACT
Which parties use simple language in their election manifestoes, and do simple election documents resonate with voters’ most pressing problems? This chapter displays the alignment between the political parties' wordings in the election documents and citizens’ responses concerning Turkey's most pressing issues. Theoretically, it is expected that parties with populist leanings are more likely to simplify their election documents to appeal to a broader public. In turn, voters should perceive and process more straightforward election documents to have an idea of what are the country's problems. As a way forward, we find the 2018 Turkish elections puzzling because there are two electoral alliances with populist entitlements to the people and the nation, the People's Alliance by AKP and MHP, and the Nation Alliance by CHP, IYIP, and SP. We evaluate whether political parties' endeavors to stand for the people/nation have any implications for Turkish election manifestoes’ and voters’ language, precisely the level of sophistication in argumentation and the ability to communicate the arguments. To this end, our research presents a measure of complexity and communication to assess the language of parties' election documents and voters’ open-ended survey responses before the 2018 presidential and parliamentary elections. Our results show that most of the political parties borrow wordings from each other's manifestoes. Besides, partisans carefully check what other partisan citizens say or do not say when naming the country's problems. We observe that the easier readability of a party's manifesto affects a party's access to a broader audience to define the most critical issues during the campaign period. The findings lead to a greater understanding of mass-elite linkages during election campaigns and have significant consequences for the future analyses of manifesto and survey data.
