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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In this article, I critically engage with the populism literature, and predicated on a conceptualization of modern democracy as a mixed regime (combining oligarchy and democracy), I provide a mechanism to connect populism-in-power to authoritarianism. As such, I elucidate a particular populist path to authoritarianism in a competitive setting by exploring two questions. First, what is the impact of populism-in-power on the modern democratic mixed regime? Second, what is the locus of populism in a modern democratic institutional framework? Utilizing the Turkish and Argentinean cases as illustrative examples of populism-in-power, I conclude that, first, unless a populist vision is accompanied by democratic institutions outside of the spectrum that modern democracy offers, when that vision which sacralizes and singularizes competitive elections becomes preponderant, it will lead to the opposite of its claim of making the people sovereign, and instead will make the rulers sovereign. Second, I argue that although there is no internal contradiction between modern democracy’s liberal or constitutional and democratic elements, there is still a paradox surrounding modern democracy. This paradox is found between the sources of its imaginative appeal and its practice as a mixed regime, and this is where we should place the perennial potential of populism.

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