ABSTRACT
Turkey has been undergoing a democratic transition since the end of military rule in 1983. This transitional process has yet to reach the phase of democratic consolidation where, in Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan’s (1996: 5) terminology, democracy becomes “the only game in town.” During this lengthy transition process, the judiciary has played significant roles. On the one hand, it has been the backbone of democracy by keeping political actors within the constitutional boundaries to establish rule of law. On the other hand, for its critiques, it has been regarded as an instrument that prevents grass-roots democracy to flourish by imposing Kemalist and statist ideologies at the expense of individual rights and freedoms. Throughout Turkey’s democratization process, several confrontations have taken place between the judiciary and other political actors on numerous issues, including political party closures (Celep 2012; Türkeş-Kiliç 2015), freedom of religious expression (Ulusoy 2007), and violation of human rights (Bozarslan 2001). In the midst of this debate there has been a never-ending reformation process, stimulated by popular demands or protests, elite actions, and continuous pressure from international actors including the European Union (EU) and European Court of Human Rights. Even though a non-negligible judicial reform process took place in Turkey in the 1990s and 2000s, it is still questionable whether these efforts really contributed to the consolidation of democracy in Turkey. The problems in the Turkish judicial system have recently been defined by Judge Ali Alkan, former president of Yargitay (Supreme Court of Appeals), as lack of judicial independence, and by Bülent Arinç, one of the founding members of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi, AK Party), as lack of public confidence.2 There is also substantial criticism over the use of the judicial system as an instrument for inter-elite competition in order to silence the oppositional movements and to reduce judicial oversight on executive decisions. Consequently, both judicial judgments and appointments in judiciary face controversial comments from different political actors. The link between the effective implementation of rule of law and democratic consolidation has been theoretically developed in scholarly works. For a constitutional political system to prevail, it is necessary to establish rule of law first and this new institutional setting has to ensure that pre-existing cleavages in a
society will be moderated, instead of being reinforced or exacerbated (Merkel 2004). I argue that whether judicial reforms have contributed to democratic consolidation or not can be evaluated through an investigation of public perception toward the judicial system in Turkey. If those groups that have been considered as deprived prior to the reform process increase their confidence in the judiciary at the end of the process, it is fair to argue that judicial reform has contributed to the emergence of rule of law and hence expansion of democratic promise to groups within society. However, if public perceptions remain unchanged (or worsen), it implies that existing cleavages in a society are reinforced by judicial reforms. To analyze whether determinants of public confidence in judiciary have changed over time, it is necessary to look at how individual determinants of confidence have evolved. Observing aggregate-level data may lead us to faulty conclusions, since there is no method to distinguish the changes between and within different groups simply by looking at aggregate data. Of course, social capital is an aggregate-level concept where issues such as tolerance, trust, or authoritarian tendencies are measured at the country level for cross-national analyses. Nevertheless, I stand with those scholars who draw attention to the importance of individual-level analysis of social capital determinants because even though social capital is an aggregate level concept, it has its basis in individual behavior, attitudes, and dispositions (Brehm and Rahn 1997). Therefore, political trust as a component of social capital requires scrutiny at individual-level analysis. Individual-level determinants have been found to be significantly explanatory on political trust in governments or parliaments (Catterberg and Moreno 2006), along with macro-level variables such as institutional design (Mishler and Rose 2001; Ecevit and Karakoç 2015) and socio-economic variables such as economic well-being (Hetherington 1998) or levels of corruption (Anderson and Tverdova 2003). This chapter attempts to explore these micro-level determinants of political trust, thereby complementing other chapters in this volume, which offer a collection of individual-level analyses of political values and behavior in Turkish politics. Empirical approaches to explaining individuals’ behavior are severely limited, as Erişen (2013) pointed out. Within the same behavioral approach, scholars have shown how values (Arikan 2013), ethnicity (Karakoç 2013), and personal experiences (Şirin 2013) have become influential in variations among different individuals’ political behavior. Therefore, this chapter contributes to the literature on the wider political behavior by revealing determinants of individual behavior and mapping its evolution toward a politically timely and relevant phenomenon, namely confidence in the judiciary in Turkey. Survey findings reported here can generate further studies with different methodologies. Furthermore, studying the evolution of political trust in the judiciary will not only contribute to our understanding of reform processes in Turkey, but it will also help us to understand the determinants of political trust in general. While comparative studies provide invaluable insight for building a theoretical framework, focusing on case studies offers a major contribution, as a “one-size-fits-all
approach” fails to explain phenomena comprehensively (Çakir and Şekercioǧlu 2015: 17). Case studies enable us to control for cross-national variances and to focus on individual determinants. In this chapter, I focus on the public perception of the judiciary in the Turkish case by investigating the continuity and changes since the 1990s by analyzing World Value Survey (WVS) data available on Turkey, and I aim to detect whether the reform process during AK Party rule (2002-) played a role in generating attitudes toward an important component of the political system, namely the judiciary. While comparing certain aggregate-level data in Turkey among different periods, I will concentrate on understanding individual determinants of attitudes toward the judiciary by decomposing the aggregate data into relevant groups to see whether the change is primarily driven by group identities that are based on ethnic, religious, or class cleavages in Turkish society. This chapter is broken up into three main sections. First, it elaborates upon the importance of rule of law in politics and democratic governance. Second, it briefly examines major reforms in the judiciary that took place in the past decade. Finally, it provides empirical results for the individual determinants of the political trust in the judiciary in the past two decades and evaluates whether the reform process has contributed to democratization, as reflected in public perception of the judiciary.
