Introduction and Contribution:

Tax policy is an important means through which governments reward their (potential) supporters and disadvantage opponents. Adjusting tax rates, subsidies, or audit practices can affect which groups gain economic advantages and, in turn, political power. Yet these dynamics are not always transparent, especially in semi-democratic and authoritarian settings, where selective, ambiguous, and corrupt tax policies are common.

Observers of recent Turkish history have documented sophisticated efforts by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the Justice and Development Party (AKP) to deepen its authoritarian rule. These include staging politically motivated trials, spreading fake news, and surveilling its opponents. AKP has also used the tax system to empower or exclude select Turkish foundations (vakıfs). However, the scope of these tax practices, as well as the extent to which the AKP has departed from its predecessors, is unclear. Focusing on one or a few visible cases of regime-friendly vakıfs gaining tax advantages may ignore larger patterns.

In “Mechanisms of privilege,” Elise Massicard and Ayça Alemdaroğlu focus specifically on vakıfs that have received tax exemptions across Turkey’s modern history. Assembling an original dataset on over 300 such vakıfs between 1967 and 2022, the authors show that the AKP is not unique in terms of how it has used exemptions to achieve its political goals. However, and especially since Turkey became a presidential system in 2018, the process has become more centralized, nepotistic, and favorable towards Islamist-aligned vakıfs. 

The reader comes away with a sense of policy continuity across Turkish regime changes, which are sometimes characterized as dramatic “ruptures.” More generally, Massicard and Alemdaroğlu draw our attention to the important role of tax exemptions in fostering regime support. National and subnational partnerships have considerably enriched Turkish vakıfs, empowering them to advance both secular and religious goals and to substitute for state provision in the face of neoliberal policy reforms. “Mechanisms of privilege” extends our understanding of a shadowy policy lever that has been widely criticized by both the European Union and the Turkish opposition. 

Tax Exemption in Modern Turkey:

Vakıfs have provided a range of services across Turkey, including education, healthcare, and infrastructure projects. A 1967 law stipulated that foundations could gain tax exemption so long as they allocated at least 80% of their income to services included in the state budget, underscoring the law’s clear political objectives. During the 1970s, exempted vakıfs followed state-led efforts at social and economic development. Beginning in the 1980s, neoliberal policies led to an increase in Islamist-aligned vakıfs, which aimed to offset growing inequality and a shrinking state. 

The Turkish government has, on multiple occasions, altered the legal landscape of exemptions to further its interests. For example, a 2003 law excluded human rights-focused vakıfs from exemption, as these were likely to challenge the new AKP government. After 2018, Turkey’s adoption of a presidential system placed exemptions under direct presidential control, and a 2021 law removed the Ministry of Finance from the exemption process. These centralizing measures have rendered tax-exempt vakıfs increasingly unaccountable. 

Only a few hundred foundations are approved for tax exemption (out of several thousand that apply), and these are rarely revoked. This situation contrasts with, e.g., the United States, where foundations are automatically exempted upon meeting clear legal requirements.

Data and Findings:

The authors’ database includes 331 exempted vakıfs since 1967, several of which subsequently lost their status. It also contains information on each foundation’s political orientation, which is drawn from news reports, website descriptions, and original interview data. Massicard and Alemdaroğlu use this data to describe the pace and politics of exemption: Is AKP a glaring outlier in modern Turkish history? And does it, in fact, restrict exemption to a narrow set of Islamist foundations? 

The data reveal that tax exemptions have continuously and gradually expanded over time. Governments have differed considerably from one another, but AKP — at least prior to the transition to a presidential system — has not uniformly granted more exemptions. In fact, AKP governments have importantly differed from one another in this respect. (These findings also hold when considering the duration of each government, given that shorter tenures tend to generate fewer exemptions.)
 

Image

Image

In terms of the politics of tax exemption, Massicard and Alemdaroğlu document a pattern of growing ambiguity and cronyism. For example, although foundations are legally required to be national in scope, strictly local vakıfs occasionally receive exemptions. Secular governments have tended to limit or reverse exemptions granted to Islamist-aligned foundations, and vice versa. One notable pattern under secular rule between 1997 and 2002 was growing exemptions to foundations representing the highly marginalized Alevi community, which Turkish Sunni leaders have tended to view as heretical. 

Interestingly, AKP’s first term in government was characterized by relatively broad exemptions, not solely to religious organizations. Since 2010, however, not only have Islamist vakıfs received an increasing number of exemptions. There is also a growing pattern of nepotism — foundations linked to Erdoğan’s family members receiving exemptions. 

Despite the growing centralization of exemption policy, AKP rivals at the subnational level have also used their power to undercut national priorities. For example, in 2019, the opposition-led Istanbul government canceled its agreements with AKP-aligned foundations. In sum, Massicard and Alemdaroğlu both deepen our understanding of five decades of Turkish politics and illustrate an overlooked item on the authoritarian “menu of manipulation.”

*Brief prepared by Adam Fefer.

Armed Groups and Electoral Coercion

The election will use facial recognition technologies and biometric fingerprints in around half of the 125 thousand voting booths (mesas), and the certificates of the electoral counts of each of those booths (form E-14) will be digitized and transmitted electronically so that citizens are able to consult the results of the official actas of the electoral process. This means the process is likely to be conducted professionally by the National Registry (Registraduría), an independent body responsible for organizing elections. However, given that many areas of Colombia are still dominated by armed groups, the Defense Ministry has already warned that it cannot guarantee the safety of voters.

Indeed, in about 300 of Colombia's 1103 municipalities, the presence of armed groups is well documented. Those include guerrillas like the ELN that did not accept the 2016 peace agreement, dissident splinter groups from the FARC, cartels, and other criminal organizations like El Cartel del Golfo, but most prominently, around 60 paramilitary organizations with varying levels of discipline and internal cohesion.

Many civil society organizations, including those engaged by the DAL team, have already begun developing electoral observation strategies that extend beyond protecting polling stations on election day. Given the levels of violence faced by candidates, political organizers, and social activists, the central concern is not only what will occur during the congressional elections next month or the presidential vote at the end of May, but rather the broader interaction between electoral administration and democratic institutions, on the one hand, and the diverse actors and specialists in violence that continue to operate across Colombia on the other, particularly in the post-2016 Peace Agreement context.

Civil Society Responses and Local Partnerships

In Bogotá, DAL’s team met with several organizations working on issues relevant to democratic governance in Colombia, including CESJUL, Justicia Racial, DeJusticia, and PARES. The main concerns expressed by the organizations center on the integrity and safety of the 2026 electoral process, particularly in vulnerable territories. They are worried about rising risks of political and electoral violence, especially in regions with a strong presence of armed actors, as well as barriers to voter access and participation affecting Afro-descendant communities. There is also a clear need for stronger data analysis and monitoring capacities to identify risks, support early warning efforts, and inform advocacy. Finally, the organizations are concerned with ensuring the legitimacy and visibility of democratic processes in conflict-affected areas, including the transparency of peace-related representation mechanisms such as the special congressional seats (curules de paz).

The team was particularly impacted by the work of the Victims Unit, led by Gloria Cuartas, in its efforts to secure reparations for victims of the conflict. The Victims Unit (Unidad para las Víctimas) is the Colombian government agency responsible for implementing policies for the comprehensive reparation of victims of the armed conflict, adopting a territorial and victim-centered approach. Its mandate focuses on overcoming conditions of vulnerability, restoring rights, and supporting victims’ active role in rebuilding their life projects and contributing to sustainable peace.

DAL will continue to engage with Colombian organizations through its Democracy Garage, a new model for interacting with democracy practitioners. The Garage seeks to bridge the gap between practitioners and scholars by identifying specific challenges that organizations face in their day-to-day work in support of democracy, which may require the use of political science analytic tools to support their efforts to defend democracy. The coming election in Colombia exhibits some of the most complex challenges the Garage wants to address, related to political polarization, the need to facilitate dialogues across the political spectrum, and the threat posed by violent actors and criminal organizations to the power of citizens to use their voice, vote, and organization in the defense of democracy.

Journalism and Democratic Resilience

DAL is closely following developments in Colombia’s upcoming electoral process and their implications for the resilience of democracy in Latin America. In this context, our team recognizes the value of community journalism on two levels. First, it serves to strengthen journalism itself, advancing freedom of expression, access to information, and the capacity of local actors to document and report on their realities. Second, it functions as a critical tool for enriching research and deepening understanding of social phenomena, particularly in environments marked by violence, territorial inequality, and institutional fragility. Strengthening locally grounded information ecosystems is therefore not only a democratic objective in its own right, but also central to understanding how democratic practices are sustained under conditions of pressure and uncertainty.

To advance this objective, and in line with the Democracy Garage methodology, DAL will support the analysis of media coverage of Colombia’s elections through Terra 360, a bilingual digital communications platform focused on dialogue, democracy, human rights, Buen Vivir (collective well-being), and international cooperation. Terra 360 is an initiative co-developed by DAL, POY Latam, and Social Focus, and in alliance with media organizations, academic institutions, and community-based organizations, including Fundación Gabo. Together, DAL, Terra 360, Fundación Gabo, and Justicia Racial will provide support to enable reporting by journalists working in high-risk regions such as Montes de María, Cauca, and Chocó, where access to reliable information is both most constrained and most consequential for democratic participation.

A Critical Test for Colombia’s Democracy

The convergence of violent actors and deep polarization already presents formidable challenges to the Colombian political process. Yet the politics of the upcoming presidential race add an additional layer of complexity. With many candidates prepared to enter the first round, the election is poised to be highly uncertain and competitive — two conditions that amplify existing vulnerabilities and concerns. It remains to be seen whether Colombia will see continuity in the executive or instead follow the pendular swing exhibited in other parts of the region. In this context of existing vulnerabilities and heightened uncertainty, the work of civil society organizations is critical to safeguard the integrity of the electoral process and to contain the potential incidence of bad actors. These elections are yet another test of the resilience of Colombia’s democratic institutions and the strength of its powerful civil society. 

Introduction and Contribution:

There is a growing recognition, both in and outside of the academy, that democracy requires more than simply voting for and removing incumbents during elections. For one, relying solely on elected representatives deprives those being represented of direct control over decisions that affect them. In addition, it can also generate — as it has in the United States and elsewhere — large gaps in responsiveness and representation, particularly for historically disenfranchised and marginal groups. 

Participatory budgeting (PB) represents one influential attempt to overcome these gaps in democratic practice. First introduced in the 1980s by the Brazilian Workers’ Party (PT), PB empowers voters to allocate public funds to projects that benefit them. Since then, ordinary citizens in thousands of places across the world have helped determine the content of local budgets.

Despite its successes, academics and practitioners remain unclear about how to address and balance considerations related to budget constraints and ease of participation. This coincides with well-known mathematical difficulties surrounding the aggregation of votes, for example, that individually consistent preferences can yield inconsistent group outcomes.

In “Rank, Pack, or Approve,” Lodewijk Gelauff and Ashish Goel introduce a dataset drawn from the novel and comprehensive Stanford Participatory Budgeting platform. The data span over 150 real participatory budgeting processes, or “elections.” Importantly, the elections vary in terms of how ballots are designed and how participants make budgeting decisions. Gelauff and Goel ask how such variation shapes important budgeting outcomes, such as when participants are more likely to become fatigued and abandon the process. 

Two key findings from the study are as follows: First, more complex PB designs lead voters to, perhaps unsurprisingly, spend more time participating; however, this does not significantly increase abandonment or “dropout” rates. Second, voting methods that force participants to deal with cost trade-offs — as opposed to merely indicating their preferences — have been found to generate less expensive projects. 

The reader comes away with a sense of how subtle differences in the design of budgeting elections meaningfully shape the allocation of resources. This will resonate with social scientists who are familiar with how, for example, different kinds of electoral rules shape political competition. To understand Gelauff and Goel’s findings, it helps to first outline how PB elections differ from one another.

Ballot Design and Voting Methods:

The basic PB setup involves organizers choosing a voting method, a list of projects to potentially be funded, and an authentication process (i.e., checking that participants are valid voters). Voters then select or rank projects given the constraints of each voting rule or method. These three rules, captured in the paper’s title, are as follows: 

The first, “K-approval,” asks voters to select up to “K” projects. The top-voted projects receive funding until the budget runs out. K-approval is simple, but its main drawback is that it ignores the costliness of each project: voters only indicate which projects they like, rather than how those choices fit within a fixed budget. The second method, “K-ranking,” asks voters to rank their preferred projects, capturing their preferences in a more fine-grained manner. As votes are aggregated using the Borda scoring method, higher-ranked projects receive greater weight or value. Finally, the “knapsack” method asks voters to choose projects that fit within a fixed budget. This method best allows participants to balance costs in a way that mimics real city councils. However, knapsack is more complex and time-consuming than K-approval or K-ranking, although the online interface design, which mimics a shopping cart, is already much simpler than it would be on paper. 

Data Collection and Findings:

As mentioned, Gelauff and Goel’s data is drawn from the open-source Stanford PB platform. This tool enables cities to conduct online PB elections with a great deal of customizability, including location, budget, language of operation, authentication process (e.g., requiring personal information or sending SMS messages), as well as methods, phases, and windows of voting. Key for the authors’ purposes, it also tracks (anonymous) voters’ choices and how much time they spend during the election. Data collection began in 2014. 

The first key finding is motivated by the fact that election organizers often prefer K-approval for its simplicity. As such, Gelauff and Goel analyze how much time participants spend on their ballots and how often they quit. Although more complex ballots — those with a larger budget and number of projects — are shown to predict longer completion times, they do not significantly increase dropout rates. The authors note that more research is needed to assess whether knapsack specifically affects dropout.

The authors also find that voters select more expensive projects with K-approval compared to the knapsack methods. However, voters indicate similarly expensive preferences for their most-preferred projects under both methods; the key difference appears lower down the list of preferences, where the knapsack constraint forces them to be more cost-conscious. In other words, the knapsack cost constraint doesn’t affect which expensive project participants most prefer. Rather, it limits how many extra expensive projects they can add.

Overall, “Rank, Pack, or Approve” deepens our understanding of how PB can improve direct democratic engagement while reducing burdens on participants. It does this while providing a large quantity of real-world data, compared with prior research that has relied on crowdworkers without a real stake in the budgeting outcome. The authors helpfully illustrate how local governments can design PB processes that are clearer and more inviting to ordinary voters. Subsequent research will benefit from using this powerful data resource, as will organizers seeking to expand local engagement.

*Brief prepared by Adam Fefer.

At the institute level, the partnership also reinforces Stanford’s broader role in advancing research and engagement on democracy.

“As the threats to democratic governance around the world multiply, so too must our commitment to the rigorous, interdisciplinary scholarship that seeks to understand and address them,” said Colin Kahl, director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. “Bringing the esteemed Journal of Democracy to CDDRL creates a powerful nexus for this vital work, strengthening FSI's role as a global leader in the study of democracy."

At the same time, the partnership comes at a moment of heightened global pressure on democratic institutions, underscoring the importance of the Journal’s role in the field.

“We are now in the twentieth consecutive year of global democratic decline — no longer just a ‘democratic recession,’ but a broader wave of authoritarian reversals,” said Larry Diamond. “Yet the struggle for democracy continues. Now more than ever, we need to understand both the causes of democratic decay and the conditions for recovery and renewal. The Journal of Democracy is unique in combining rigorous scholarship with timely, accessible analysis of developments around the world.”

For Stanford students, the partnership creates a more direct pathway into the world of ideas, publishing, and public scholarship. Through new editorial internships, undergraduates and recent graduate alumni can gain hands-on experience working with a leading journal that bridges scholarship and practice.

It also strengthens Stanford’s intellectual presence in democracy studies by giving CDDRL-affiliated faculty a more formal role in supporting the Journal’s work through serving on its editorial board. Stanford faculty will contribute to the Journal’s editorial mission, inspire new lines of inquiry, and help to identify emerging areas of research to be explored in its pages.

“This partnership with CDDRL is exceptionally exciting for the Journal of Democracy and its readers,” shared Will Dobson, the Journal’s co-editor. “CDDRL is not only the leading research center in the field, but its long history of collaboration with the Journal makes this a natural fit. We are thrilled to be working with CDDRL and with the possibilities this partnership will unlock.”

With a wide readership and growing digital footprint, the Journal of Democracy reaches audiences across academia, government, journalism, and civil society. It publishes roughly 100 online-exclusive essays each year alongside its quarterly print issues and engages readers through newsletters with more than 20,000 subscribers, across social media, in Apple News, and on leading podcasts. As the most-read journal in the Johns Hopkins University Press portfolio of more than 750 publications, it has become a central venue for ideas about democratic governance and political change worldwide. Through its partnership with CDDRL, the Journal is positioned to expand that reach even further — drawing on Stanford’s research community and global practitioner networks to bring new voices and perspectives into the conversation.