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Studying autocratization in Turkey: political institutions, populism, and neoliberalism

Review products

William Hale and Ergun Özbudun, Islamism, Democracy, and Liberalism in Turkey: The Case of the JDP (London: Routledge, 2010).
İsmet Akça, Ahmet Bekmen, and Barış Alp Özden (eds.), Turkey Reframed: Constituting Neoliberal Hegemony (London: Pluto Press, 2014).
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Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 September 2020

Yunus Sözen
Yunus Sözen*
Affiliation:
Le Moyne College, Department of Political Science, Reilly Hall 414, 1419 Salt Springs Road, Syracuse, NY 13214, sozenmy@lemoyne.edu.
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Abstract

In this review article I classify the literature on the Turkish political regime during Justice and Development Party rule as two waves of studies, and a potential third wave. The first wave was prevalent at least until the Gezi uprisings in 2013. I argue that, in this wave, the main debate was between two rival and largely culturalist perspectives with conceptual toolkits that tended to interpret regime change through the lens of social transformations. I also maintain that scholarly works written from the hegemonic perspective of this wave, utilizing center–periphery and state–society dichotomies, and a narrow range of concepts from the democratization literature (from defective democracy to democratic consolidation), have misidentified/misinterpreted burgeoning autocratization in Turkey as democratization, albeit with problems. The Gezi uprisings brought to the fore already existing authoritarian features of the Turkish political regime and led to the second wave of studies. In the second wave, the focus was on naming Turkey’s new political regime as a diminished subtype of authoritarianism, and thick descriptions of different facets of Turkey’s new authoritarianism. Finally, I suggest that there is a need for a third wave that builds on recent studies and focuses on explaining Turkey’s autocratization process and democratic breakdown, as well as the impact of autocratization on other aspects of Turkish politics and society.

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Review Article
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New Perspectives on Turkey , Volume 63 , November 2020 , pp. 209 - 235
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© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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