Identifying the Diffusion and Suppression of Political Naming in Turkey with a Matched Interrupted Time Series Design

Abstract. What can naming practices reveal about political expression under authoritarian rule? We argue that a name’s political association can encourage adoption, while repression may increase its perceived costs. Using Turkish birth registration records from 1960 to 1990, we examine Deniz naming around the persecution and execution of the revolutionary activist Deniz Gezmiş and the period of repression surrounding the 1980 military coup. To assess this account against broader cultural influences, we combine province and district models of departures from a projected trajectory with comparisons against forty names associated with the 1930s language reform, matched on pre-1971 naming patterns. Deniz’s naming rate rises during the 1970s and contracts around the coup while remaining above the matched-name benchmark through 1990. Its joint growth and contraction statistic ranks first within the selected pool in both analyses. Larger modeled contractions occur where the earlier increase was greater and prior support for the Turkish Workers’ Party was stronger. These findings support a political interpretation of naming, conditional on the projection rules, comparability of the selected names, and registry coverage. Individual intentions and the mechanisms producing the contraction remain unresolved. The paper shows how administrative records of everyday choices can inform the study of political expression without requiring explicit declarations of political allegiance.

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This paper is my independent methodological contribution to a doctoral dissertation. The underlying data collection and the broader substantive project on naming and political resistance are joint work with Asli Cansunar, Can Bodrumlu, and Nela Mrchkovska.