Turkey’s decision on its role in the Iraq war in 2003 illustrates the power—and limits—of parliaments as actors in foreign policy. Traditionally, assemblies are not seen as important players in the foreign policies of parliamentary democracies. Instead, cabinets are generally considered the chief policymaking authorities. If the government enjoys a parliamentary majority, legislatures typically support the cabinet, if they are brought into the process at all. The March 1, 2003 vote by the Turkish parliament to not allow the United States to use Turkey as a base for the Iraq invasion challenges this conventional wisdom on parliamentary influence (in addition to many interest‐based explanations of foreign policy). This paper examines this decision in the context of the role of parliaments in foreign policies and explores the relationships between parliamentary influence, leadership, intraparty politics, and public opinion.
Explanations of states' security decisions prioritise structuralsystemic, institutional and culturalconstraints that characterise foreign security decisions as a function of external/international, domestic/institutional, or normative/cultural factors. By examining Turkey 's 1990-1991 and 2003 Iraq war decisions systematically, we problematise this prioritisation of structure, and we investigate the dynamic relationship between structural constraints and leaders in their decision-making environments. In these cases, while the structural constraints remain constant or indeterminate, the decision outcomes and the decision-making process differ significantly. Our findings, based on structured-focused comparison, process tracing, and leadership trait analysis, suggest that the leaders' personalities and how they react to constraints account for this difference and that dependence on only one set of factors leads to an incomplete understanding of security policies and international politics. We contribute to the broader understanding of leaders' personalities by suggesting that self-confidence and cognitive complexity are the key traits distinguishing leaders' orientations towards structural constraints.Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, upon assuming power as prime minister during the decisionmaking process, was faced with questions of whether or not Turkey would allow the stationing of the US troops on its soil and grant over-flight rights. Both leaders supported cooperation with the US requests, but faced significant domestic opposition. Özal dominated the decision making in the first Gulf War, even though he had no specific constitutional authority to do so, and he engineered Turkish cooperation with the US-led military offensive against Iraq. Erdoğan, on the other hand, delegated authority and bungled a parliamentary vote that resulted in the rejection to the stationing of the US troops and the preclusion of a Northern front in the invasion of Iraq. Both episodes were significant junctures in the Turkish-US relations.In this study, we argue that foreign policymaking involves a dynamic relationship between political leadership as agency and the international, institutional and cultural constraints as structure. Throughout, we use the term 'structure' as the context in which action takes place; it not only limits but also shapes and propels behaviour. By 'agency', we mean the role of humans in the decision-making process. We illustrate the dynamic structureagency interaction in the Turkish decision-making context analysing the 1991 and 2003 Iraq war decisions. These cases are especially suitable for the purpose of our argument because although structural constraints were similar or indeterminate between Turkey's Iraq war decisions, the processes and choices were very different. This, we conclude, is indicative of the dynamic relationship between agency and structure. Specifically, we see two leaders, Özal in the first Iraq war and Erdoğan in the second Iraq war, with very different orientations towards structural constraints. ...
Personality approaches to politics are often criticized for not examining the effect that institutional role constraints have on individual beliefs and preferences. When leaders appear to change their stance when they change roles, it is assumed that roles have a determining influence. Modern personality theory and contemporary sociological role theory, however, view the effects of roles as interacting with agents' personalities. In this article, we investigate this question by comparing personality profiles of three Turkish leaders ( € Ozal, Demirel, and G€ ul) during their tenure as prime minister and during their subsequent time as president. For G€ ul, we perform an additional comparison during his time as foreign minister. The personality profiles are in the form of quantitative scores generated from machine-coded content analysis of leaders' words using the Leadership Trait Analysis method. We hypothesize that different leaders will be more susceptible to changing role contexts, depending on core personality traits, and that different traits are more likely to change with new roles. Overall, our results suggest that leaders' traits are fairly resistant to changes across roles and that task orientation is the most likely trait to change as leaders adapt to different role demands and expectations. This study makes a contribution to our understanding of the interaction between personality and political contexts by offering specific theoretically derived hypotheses and by empirically and statistically examining a preliminary set of expectations that could be applied more broadly to other leaders.When leaders change their political and institutional position, many would expect them to adapt to that new position. Their expressed beliefs and style of engaging with others might change with different role demands, expectations of role-appropriate behavior, and the powers and incentives associated with the position. When leaders do adapt to new roles, this change in 1 0162-895X
Using both quantitative and qualitative research techniques, we investigate the effect of leaders' style and personality on foreign policy. The study examines six Turkish leaders, Süleyman Demirel, Bülent Ecevit, Necmettin Erbakan, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Abdullah Gül, and Turgut Özal, and 18 foreign policy cases to answer the followings: Do Turkish leaders differ from each other in terms of their personality traits and styles? How did their styles affect their foreign policy choices? How did they react to various domestic and international constraints they encountered in cases of foreign policy? Our findings suggest that: (a) in terms of their personality traits, Turkish leaders do not collectively fit in one category; (b) there are some stark differences among our six leaders, although some leaders are more similar to each other than others in terms of their personality traits and styles; (c) these differences were observable in the foreign policy decisions they made.
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