Competition in a Populist Authoritarian Regime: The June 2018 Dual Elections in Turkey

Consolidating and Contesting Authoritarian Neoliberalism in Turkey: Towards a Framework

“…3. Between 2014 and 2017, while the Presidency was still largely a ceremonial post, Recep Tayyip Erdogan acted as the de facto Head of Government (for a further discussion, see Sayarı, 2016;Sözen, 2019). 4.…”

“…The AKP still has the potential for consent generation via various mechanisms and discourses, as election and referendum results demonstrate. The AKP's electoral popularity among the masses, who are the ones most harmed by neoliberal economic policies, is explained through neoliberal populism by critical political economists (Adaman & Akbulut, 2020;Akçay, 2018;Bozkurt, 2013;Özden, 2014;Yıldırım, 2009), and the evergrowing literature on the topic discusses different dimensions of AKP's populism (Aytaç & Öniş, 2014;Castaldo, 2018;Dinçşahin, 2012;Selçuk, 2016;Sözen, 2019;Yabancı, 2016;Yabancı & Taleski, 2018). However, populism is not one of the dimensions examined by the contributions to this volume.…”

“…The centralisation of administration made it possible for the AKP to initiate and pass numerous laws and legislative amendments without the meaningful participation of opposition parties or social groups or supervision of the legislative and executive branches. 4 This executive centralisation is personalised through the President, which is defined as 'hyperpresidentialism' (Sözen, 2019; see also İnsel, 2017 for personalisation).…”

Resisting Abusive Legalism: Electoral Fairness and the Partisan Commitment to Political Pluralism

“…In the past decade, this hopeful tone has been made largely obsolete by a global context of erosion of constitutional essentials and democratic rights affecting new and old democracies alike (Freedom House, 2019b;Öniş & Kutlay, 2019). In countries such as Hungary, Poland, Turkey, the United States or the United Kingdom, political majorities on the right of the political spectrum have been changing the rules of the political game to favour themselves, thus undermining the fairness of the electoral process, through constitutional amendments, by-passing intermediary institutions and the misuse of political appointment (Bogaards, 2018;Cinar, 2019;Norris, 2017a;Pech & Scheppele, 2017;Sözen, 2019;Stewart, 2017). These processes have led to a radical change in the focus of democracy studies, from what appeared yesterday to be an inexorable extension of the liberal world, to its heightened vulnerability in the populist era.…”

“…These legal instruments, which we group under the umbrella term abusive legalism, allow legitimately elected governments using procedures provided by the democratic framework itself and consistent with a nominal respect for the rule of law to undermine the integrity of democratic institutions. Political majorities in countries such as Hungary, Poland, Turkey, the United States and the United Kingdom, are changing the rules of the political game to favour themselves without using force or fraud (Bogaards, 2018;Cinar, 2019;Norris, 2017a;Pech & Scheppele, 2017;Sözen, 2019;Stewart, 2017). At the extreme, these processes can result in "illiberal or diminished forms of democracy" (Meyerrose, 2020) where electoral fairness is fundamentally undermined: elections are still free, to the extent that a variety of parties can compete, but have fundamentally ceased to be fair.…”