The Erdoganization of Turkish politics and the role of the opposition

Date

2019-10-01

Author

Selcuk, Orcun
Hekimci, Dilara
Erpul, Onur

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

298
views

0
downloads

This article examines the personalization of Turkish politics during Recep Tayyip Erdogan's third term as prime minister. While many studies focus on the prime minister's growing personal domination of the executive branch, we consider how leaders of the opposition reflected and reinforced that trend. To test our hypotheses on this 'Erdoganization,' we employed a content analysis to consider Kemal Kilicdaroglu and Devlet Bahceli's speeches at weekly parliamentary group meetings of the CHP and the MHP. Our findings reveal that, over time, both leaders increasingly referred to the prime minister in proportion to the ruling party. Between the June 2011 parliamentary elections and the August 2014 presidential elections, Kilicdaroglu and Bahceli more frequently targeted Prime Minister Erdogan with personal insults such as 'separatist', 'dictator', and 'thief.' Specifically, we show that during the PKK Peace Process, the Gezi Park Protests, and the Corruption Scandal, Erdoganization reached its peak levels. The article's conceptual framework and empirical findings have implications for the broader literature on the role of opposition in personalized settings.

Subject Keywords

Personalization, political parties, content analysis, opposition, Turkey, PERSONALIZATION, PRESIDENTS, TURKEY

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/99920

Journal

SOUTHEAST EUROPEAN AND BLACK SEA STUDIES

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1080/14683857.2019.1689902

Collections

Department of International Relations, Article

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

The Military and Europeanization Reforms in Turkey Ünlü Bilgiç, Tuba (Informa UK Limited, 2009-01-01) The Europeanization reforms in Turkey are partly designed to bring about the demilitarization of Turkish politics. However, up to now reforms have not been free from the military's impact. The democracy game is still played in a field whose borders have been delimited by the Turkish armed forces (TAF) and its interpretation of Kemalism. Even when the boundaries of these borders were extended, it was more due to the TAF's self-restraint, motivated by the prospect of membership in the EU, rather than the rest...
The bifurcation of political Islam in Turkey : the case of the People's Voice party Arslan, Nursel; Şen, Mustafa; Department of Sociology (2012) This study aims to show why there was a schism within National Outlook (Milli Görüş, MG) in Turkey during 2000s, why political Islamist parties having different discourse from MG emerged, and more specifically why and how People's Voice Party (Halkın Sesi Partisi - HAS Party) differed from MG and political Islamist parties. The argument of this study is that socioeconomic factors have played an important role in differentiation of political Islam in Turkey and transformation of MG. Consequently, I tried to ...
An Analysis of the national will discourse of Erdoğan: from ‘nation-as-one’ to nation as us Oral, Bahar; Özçoban Üstüner, Fahriye; Department of Political Science and Public Administration (2015) This thesis has produced for analyzing the national will discourse of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the chairman of JDP and Prime Minister of Turkish Republic between the years of 2002-2014. National will concept is thought to be one of the constitutive components of Erdoğan’s discourse and it is observed that this concept is overused by Erdoğan. Whilst working on this subject, the French thinker Claude Lefort’s theory, he theory of ‘empty space of power’ has utilized. According to this theory, power which had been...
The Legal, political and sociological roots of tutelary regime in single - party period Ete, Hatem; Tokluoğlu, Ayşe Ceylan; Department of Sociology (2012) This dissertation examines the political regime during the single party rule in Turkey between the years of 1923-1950 in relation to the concept of tutelage. The main argument supported in this work is that tutelary tendencies, contrary to the assumptions of Kemalist historicization, do not serve as segue to democracy, but rather make consolidation of democracy difficult, even impossible. In support, this dissertation provides a close examination of the Kemalist nation building process beginning from the Ot...
Politics and the Mass Media in Turkey Kaya, Ahmet Raşit; Çakmur, Barış (Informa UK Limited, 2010-01-01) This article sets out to examine the linkages between the media and politics in Turkey. It argues that, rooted in the world of politics from the outset, Turkish media has always been marked by a high degree of political parallelism. As regulator and funder, the state, making up the political majority, exerted strong control over the media. In the 1990s, the shift to a globalized market and the explosive growth of private broadcasting did not decrease the high degree of political parallelism. Instead, it ena...

Citation Formats

O. Selcuk, D. Hekimci, and O. Erpul, “The Erdoganization of Turkish politics and the role of the opposition,” SOUTHEAST EUROPEAN AND BLACK SEA STUDIES, vol. 19, no. 4, pp. 541–564, 2019, Accessed: 00, 2022. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/99920.