ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Turkey’s democratic development from a political economy perspective. It observes that, from a historical viewpoint, the current interplay of economic and political phenomena in Turkey is atypical and problematic. In most of its multiparty history, Turkey has exhibited fairly consistent and often predictable patterns of correspondence between policy strategies, dominant societal preferences, and underlying institutional arrangements, alternating between boom-and-bust cycles of growth accompanied by persistent, if staccato, democratic progress. The current period of relative economic stagnation and democratic back-pedalling is unusual. Yet despite this atypical pattern we should not lose sight of the overwhelming evidence in support of the positive long-term correlation between economic and political development, between qualitative increases in national wealth and the democratization of national politics. While there are different interpretations of this correlation, at a minimum it suggests that the structural impediments to Turkey’s economic development cannot be good for its democracy in the long run. The most important of these impediments is the country’s deepening middleincome trap, which in fact offers ample insight into the current juncture of democratic relapse. The inability to move beyond the middle-income range, it is argued, is both politically conditioned and complicates Turkey’s democratic prospects. The point is consistent with Merkel’s (2014) framework of “embedded democracy” as discussed in the opening chapter, as he argues that favorable economic conditions (and social justice) help countries avoid many problems of democratic consolidation. The study of the interconnection between the economic and the political has a distinguished history, and the discussion begins with introducing three fundamental research directions in this tradition relevant to the question of democracy. This is followed by a brief account of Turkish democracy and economic development until the turn of the century, paying special attention to the interplay of distributive and policy trajectories. The third section examines the contemporary, post-2002 context, with a focus on both internal and external dynamics. It is in this otherwise brief period that we see most clearly the synchronous rise and fall of the country’s democratic and economic fortunes, as discussed in the fourth section. Here we also note a disconcerting recent tendency toward institutional
deterioration at an unprecedented scale, which is strongly implicated in the country’s current economic slowdown.
