Perceptions of government performance and collective trauma: the case of the 2023 Turkish earthquakes

Our Professor of European Politics Professor Yaprak Gürsoy has co-authored a new journal article with Buğra Güngör in The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, which seeks to understand government evaluations following the 2023 Turkish earthquakes by testing the attentive retrospection, blind retrospection, and affective polarisation arguments. Their research looks at earthquake-related losses and negative emotions to examine how people evaluated government performance across three dimensions: disaster management, preparedness, and blame attribution.

Key findings:

• Personal earthquake losses and negative emotions were associated with more critical views of government management and preparedness, but not with directly blaming the government, suggesting citizens drew a nuanced distinction between performance failures and ultimate responsibility in a natural disaster.
• Partisanship was by far the strongest predictor across all three dimensions. Opposition supporters were roughly 98% less likely to rate the government's response positively and nearly 12 times more likely to assign blame.
• Trust in social media (the primary source of independent reporting in a media environment tightly controlled by the government) was independently linked to negative evaluations across all models.

The broader implication: in highly polarised and electorally autocratic contexts, affective polarisation can insulate incumbents from accountability that disasters might otherwise trigger, with important consequences for both electoral outcomes and longer-term democratisation.