Does policy style shift when the political regime changes? Insights from Turkey

Analyzing national policy styles empirically using the Sustainable Governance Indicators (SGI): insights into long‐term patterns of policy‐making

“…Recent empirical work by Richardson (2018aRichardson ( , 2018b on the British policy style contends that the national policy style has shifted back toward the traditional Westminster model of top-down policy-making. Richardson attributes the change in the British policy style to the change in the ideological composition of the government-a finding also reported by Ertugal (2021) for Turkey. More precisely, it is the entering into office of right-wing populist governments that Richardson (2018aRichardson ( , 2018b, Tosun et al (2022), and some contributions to the volume edited by Zahariadis et al (2022) associate with a more impositional and less anticipatory policy style.…”

“…However, the data also revealed instances of changes in policy styles. Consequently, for conceptual advancement, it appears useful to invest more effort in theorizing those factors that could potentially bring about change in policy styles, such as crises (Zahariadis et al, 2021(Zahariadis et al, , 2022, changes in political regimes (Ertugal, 2021), or European integration (Candel et al, 2020) and disintegration (Richardson, 2018a(Richardson, , 2018b, and putting into perspective those factors that have a supposedly stabilizing effect. To our knowledge, this is the first time that this aspect could be assessed in a systematic fashion at the country level, since the design of previous research was not suitable for capturing a large number of countries over a longer period of time.…”

“…Future research is invited to help disentangling the direct effects of institutions and the moderating effects of institutions for the policy-makers' behavior. Fortunately, there exists a small but growing body of empirical research on policy styles that can serve as the point of departure for such efforts (Candel et al, 2020;Ertugal, 2021;Howlett & Tosun, 2019aTosun et al, 2022;Zahariadis et al, 2021Zahariadis et al, , 2022.…”

“…However, the data also revealed instances of changes in policy styles. Consequently, for conceptual advancement, it appears useful to invest more effort in theorizing those factors that could potentially bring about change in policy styles, such as crises (Zahariadis et al, 2021, 2022), changes in political regimes (Ertugal, 2021), or European integration (Candel et al, 2020) and disintegration (Richardson, 2018a, 2018b), and putting into perspective those factors that have a supposedly stabilizing effect.…”

Policy styles and pandemic management: The case of Turkey

“…This study examines Turkey's COVID‐19 pandemic management from January 2020 (following the announcement of the pneumonia‐like cases in Wuhan by the World Health Organization) until November 2021. It is built upon the recent literature that identifies the interlinkages between policy styles and policy responses (Bakır, 2020 ; Ertugal, 2021 ; Zahariadis et al, 2021 ). It is premised on the assumption that policy‐making processes are influenced by institutional arrangements and political culture (Clemens & Cook, 1999 ; Howlett & Tosun, 2019 ).…”