The End of the Habermassian Ideal? Political Communication on Twitter During the 2017 Turkish Constitutional Referendum

With increasing attention devoted to automated bot accounts, fake news, and echo chambers, how much of the theory of a Habermassian public sphere is still applicable to social media? Drawing on Twitter data collected on April 16, 2017, during the night of Turkey’s 2017 Constitutional Referendum, we test whether the networks of political communication resemble the communicative structures characteristic of Habermas’s “public sphere.” The referendum left the country sharply divided; 51.4 percent of the electorate voted in favor of amending the constitution to grant sweeping new executive powers to the presidency, with an overall turnout of 85.46 percent. In this article, we examine whether Twitter users were meaningfully engaged on the night of the referendum, and if their communicative patterns resembled a networked public sphere, that is, a space where information and ideas are exchanged, and public opinion is formed in a deliberative, rational manner. We find ideological uniformity, polarization, and partisan antipathy to be especially evident—mirroring existing social tensions in Turkey. Rather than resembling a public sphere, we found Twitter users to be more likely to communicate on the basis of homophily—rather than to engage in democratic debate or establish a common ground between the two campaigns.