ABSTRACT

As discussed in the first chapter of this book, in institutional system analysis, the evolution of political economies is not explicated through critical junctures but through turning points or relational transitions on the basis of varying interpenetrations of path-dependence and change dynamics, the main patterns of which are depicted in Figure 1.4 (p. 41). In other words, continuities and discontinuities are dialectic and interconstitutive units of social action. A diachronic examination of the transformation from Ottoman Islam to the AKP’s conservative democracy is a case in point. The fact that Ottoman Islam relied upon a normatively contingent social system intensified the inter-repulsive tension between the changes that the secularly motivated civil military bureaucracy attempted to enforce, as previously discussed, and the path-dependencies that conservatively or religiously minded politico-economic actors attempted to resurrect or perpetuate.