Snowball effects

▶ There are snowball and bandwagon effects, and sparks & prairie fires. Radical change, be it revolution or reform, can happen without a hint at the possibility. Even those who are the carriers of this shift are taken by surprise.

▶ One reason is that private truths differ fundamentally from public lies. Nevertheless, this can basically occur in extremely closed regimes, like Eastern Europe before 1989.

▶ In most cases change is somewhat anticipated but its exact timing –or exact form- remains a mystery. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 wasn’t totally unexpected but it was sparked all of a sudden. Bolsheviks numbered only 10.000 in February. In October they were about a million.

▶ Three important books that say a lot about political psychology

▶ In Iran, Islamists came to power in 1979. A couple of months before the U.S. intelligence had claimed that the ancient regime was fully entrenched to political soil, and the Shah was more powerful than ever.

▶ Even in democratic regimes, a new game has started with simulations and simulacra constantly put to use to hide the real game. The game is about which political force divide the opposing will force –or fronts, parties, lines, and ideologies. Which political fault line will pay the price of the deep politico-economic, ideological and even cultural crisis in-the-making?

▶ The necessity to translate the (move the entire) political surface is urgent for the incumbent party more than it is for the opposition. It is also mandatory to recast the political mapping (function) that relates economic hardships to political scores because otherwise no incumbent can win.

▶ Is this happening? This is very important because if a bloc shatters first, then there may be what political science calls snowball or bandwagon effects. Politics is sometimes only about guessing the winner and within party factions and in the bureaucracy people understand what is going on quite rapidly.

▶ If the last week brings about a tacit and mute landslide that is already in the making, the opposition will win. If there is no snowball effect, then there will possibly be a second round. There is of course the possibility that Erdogan wins in the first round, but from the looks of the polls this outcome has the least probability.