Narrative power in electoral autocracies: The policy narrative behind the success of a pension movement

How did a pension movement construct its narrative around pension age, shaping its structure and content to influence policy change in an electoral autocracy? This article delves into the campaign of the Turkish pension movement, a single-issue movement self-identifying as “people stuck in the pension age barrier” [emeklilikte yaşa takılanlar (EYT) in Turkish], to analyze policy narratives in an electoral autocratic context. Employing the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF), this exploratory study dissects the Turkish pension movement's policy narrative through an examination of nearly 2100 tweets, selected from a total of 64,980 tweets posted between 2020 and 2023. It shows how, in 280 characters, the movement challenged the long-established pension age. The article reveals that the EYT movement positions itself as the hero, using a victim-centered injustice narrative with the villain often left vague, likely to preserve dialogue with the government. The movement emphasizes the diffused benefits of the moral of the story, portraying its constituency as larger than it is and its base of allies as wide as possible, reflecting the movement's strategic engagement with electoral politics. This study enhances the NPF literature by demonstrating how non-governmental actors construct influential narratives in electoral autocracies.