Browsing by Subject "Turkey"

How do political leaders strategically manage fiscal policy formation to enhance their political survival? What are the implications of the fiscal mechanics of survival for theories of redistribution and democratic transition? This dissertation examines the complex relationship between political regime types and fiscal information asymmetries. I focus on budgetary policies (taxation and public spending) as major strategic tools available to the executive for co-optation and punishment of opponents. I argue that allowing some degree of contestation and transparency on the fiscal contract in electoral authoritarian regimes helps the executive identify distributive claims and co-opt the opposition. Paradoxically, in new democracies, political survival depends more on lower levels of budget transparency than existent theories would have us expect. Chapters 1 and 2 present a general formal model from which I derive the major hypotheses of the study. Second, Chapters 3, 4 and 5 use new cross-national measures of fiscal transparency and test empirically the theoretical implications. The statistical models confirm the main theoretical intuitions. Finally, Chapter 6 compares in greater detail the evolution of fiscal transparency in Morocco, Turkey and Romania between 1950 and 2000. I argue that fiscal taboos closely followed the shifting political alliance and their distributional consequences for leader's survival.

A majority of formal theoretic research in political science treats political parties as unitary actors, and endows them with decision-making powers not unlike those of strategic individuals. This is true both of most research in the spatial-theoretic tradition, as well as most game theoretic research in the field of comparative political-economy. In contrast, my dissertation examines strategic equilibria which arise when competition takes place simultaneously within parties over organizational control and between parties over political office. I first distinguish between three intra-organizational elements: a party's parliamentary group, its activist cadre, and its executive leaders. Chapters 2-4 develop a set of foundational game theoretic models which identify the equilibrium balance of power among these 3 organizational elements as a function of a country's electoral institutions and voters' relative responsiveness to marginal policy changes. In turn, this more complete understanding of intra-party competition sheds light on a number of important questions in comparative politics and comparative political-economy. For example, it helps to identify conditions under which Downsian vote-maximization is in fact a viable assumption in spatial theoretic models; conditions under which Duverger's argument that proportional representation (PR) should tend to generate multi-party competition may not apply; and, in contrast to Lijphart's famous argument, conditions under which PR may instigate rather than mediate social conflict. Ten months of intensive field research conducted in Turkey provide both the quantitative and the qualitative data which constitute the dissertation's most basic empirical material. This data includes primary and secondary source material on the history of intra-organizational competition in Turkey; observational and informant-based information on contemporary Turkish politics and the events of 2006-2008; and a data set of over 4,000 observations on party-switching in the Turkish Parliament (1987-2007).

This dissertation project argues that high levels of religious commitment within a population-that is, high levels of importance attached to religious identities and ideas-can increase a state's propensity for initiating conflict. Following a three-article framework, the project contains three interlocking empirical studies, each speaking to religion's role in conditioning interstate conflict and connections between domestic culture and global politics.

Article 1, "Religiosity and Bellicosity: The Impact of Religious Commitment on Patterns of Interstate Conflict," explores whether states with religiously committed citizens are more likely to initiate conflict than states with less committed populations. The article builds upon findings within the literature on American politics that link individuals' levels of religious commitment to their attitudes about foreign policy, and tests whether the implications of these findings have cross-national applicability and explanatory power for interstate conflict. Using a novel, robust measure of the proportion of a state's population that is religiously committed, as well as monadic and dyadic statistical models, the analysis finds widespread connections between religious commitment and bellicose state behaviors. The results show that states with more religiously committed populations demonstrate higher propensities for initiating conflict with other states. This relationship is most severe when both states in a dyad have high levels of religious commitment, while it does not appear to be conditioned by whether majorities within the populations of each state ascribe to different religious traditions.

Article 2, "Sacred Bonds? Leaders, Religious Constituents, and Foreign Policy in Turkey," outlines a theory to more deeply analyze the empirical phenomenon identified in the first article, explaining why countries with religiously committed populations are likely to be prone to international conflict. The article builds the theory and then tests it on a case study of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's tenure as prime minister and president of Turkey. The theory posits that in highly religious societies such as Turkey, leaders have incentives to compete for and maintain the support of their religious citizens when they perceive credible threats from domestic challengers. To effectively compete, leaders use religious signals to "outbid" their opponents and establish themselves as trustworthy champions of the faithful. As part of this process, leaders are incentivized to religiously outbid into the realm of foreign policy in pursuit of "rally-round-the-sacred-symbol" effects, and so will "spiritualize" foreign threats with religious framing. In framing foreign affairs as having implications beyond the material world, however, leaders find the domestic costs of backing down from addressing the threats particularly high and their audiences especially unforgiving of inaction. Ultimately, this increases the likelihood that leaders will follow through on combative rhetoric and results in higher overall likelihoods that they will initiate conflict. The case study leverages original field interviews and both Turkish and English-language resources to test and refine the mechanisms of the general theory.

Finally, Article 3, "Choose Your Words Faithfully: Religious Commitment, Elite Rhetoric, and the Formation of Individual Foreign Policy Opinion," takes a micro-level approach to the relationship between religious commitment and state foreign policy behaviors. The project focuses on why and how religious signals, like those identified in the macro theory of Article 2, may influence the foreign policy opinions of religiously committed people and elicit their support for a particular issue. Existing public opinion research in the United States has shown a connection between individuals' levels of religious commitment and their opinions about foreign affairs. However, relatively little is known about what drives this association, particularly when foreign policies do not have clear partisan stakeholders. The article posits that the relationship is at least partially attributable to how religiously committed people process elite cues about foreign policy issues, as they will most privilege the opinions of elites who use religious signaling. The results of an original survey experiment administered to a national sample of American adults tentatively support this argument, though the analysis suggests that not all religious signals are created equal. Religiously committed respondents show the greatest support for a foreign policy recommendation when it has been made using religious rhetoric, while a recommendation made by elites simply identified as being religious receives no more support-and often less-than one made by a non-religious group. The study contributes to our understanding of how members of the public develop foreign policy preferences in relation to their religious convictions and also helps to identify the audience for whom religious rhetoric may be an effective framing tool. The empirical evidence presented by the article contains a great deal of uncertainty, so these conclusions are ultimately preliminary, however, one final result about which there is no ambiguity-only consistent statistical significance-is that individual religious commitment matters for shaping foreign policy opinion, even in the absence of elite religious framing. Future research must therefore continue to grapple with explaining the significance of religious commitment to how individuals develop views on foreign policy.

Based on fieldwork in Bursa and archival research, this dissertation investigates the historical interplay between professional soccer, nationalism, and globalization in Turkey. The dissertation makes the case that the globalized commercialized competition in professional soccer as well as attempts and failures to regulate the explosive economic and cultural dynamics of professional soccer have made significant contributions to the remaking of Turkish nation-building over the decades throughout the 20th century and until the present day. Starting with a historical analysis of the interwar origins of commercial soccer in post-imperial Istanbul and its fraught relation to militarist nation-building, the dissertation then moves to the formation of a national sport bureaucracy and subsequent development of a national professional league after the 1960s. An ethnography of a city team Bursaspor, which constitutes the second half of the dissertation, demonstrates that what I call the joint-stock politics of city’s soccer team is a cultural performance for the city to tell itself stories about its industrial modernity and the globalizing transformations the city undergoes.

This dissertation examines the interplay between sovereignty and governmentality in the domain of welfare provision in Turkey’s Kurdish southeast through the analytic of debt.

The dissertation shows that debt lies at the heart of Turkish and Kurdish political identities in Turkey, but with a significant difference. For decades the Turkish state has exerted strong control over the economy and selectively distributed economic resources in favor of allegiant populations while dispossessing the unruly. This dynamic has given way to a common conception among the mainstream Turkish citizenry that allocation of economic resources is at the mercy of the state and citizens owe allegiance and obedience to the state for all that it bestows on them.

Although this debt morality pervades Turkey, it is interrupted and transformed in the Kurdish region. Considered the internal other of the Turkish nation and resisting ethnic homogenization and economic and political centralization policies for decades, Kurds have been subjected to systematic state violence and dispossession. This state violence and resistance to it have engendered a counter-debt morality in the Kurdish region, finding expression in the idiom bedel ödemek (paying the price). Foregrounding a history of state violence and dispossession rather than state benevolence, bedel reverses the hegemonic debt morality in Turkey, rendering the state indebted to the Kurds. Moreover, having emerged out of the Kurdish struggle, bedel redefines the Kurdish political identity around a new set of obligations: to stand up against the state for individual and collective self-determination and to pay tribute to those who made sacrifices in resisting the state.

This dissertation unpacks the political, economic and cultural logics of these two competing debt moralities and traces their contestation in the domain of welfare bureaucracy in an effort to demonstrate how struggles over sovereignty permeate governmental practices in the region.

My two years of ethnographic research (2012–2014) largely focused on the decision-making practices of local welfare officials, who enjoy an immense discretionary power in selecting beneficiaries. It showed that many officials’ practices were informed by the hegemonic debt morality in Turkey that promotes welfare as state benevolence and expects beneficiaries to repay their debt through allegiance and subservience. Although bedel leaks into welfare distribution—through the moral judgments of Kurdish officials—it works in the shadows, remaining largely silent and secret. This suppression of bedel, I suggest, bespeaks the state’s role in denying its own violence and asserting a unidirectional debt relation on beneficiary citizens. Illustrating how state-sponsored social welfare governance operates as a violent, debt-producing mechanism, the dissertation suggests that sovereign violence is intrinsic to the state’s governmental practices in the Kurdish region.

However, the domain of social welfare is not limited to the central state-sponsored social assistance programs. Over the years Kurdish movement has initiated its own welfare programs. Just as with centrally organized welfare programs, alleviation of poverty constitutes the main framework in which these initiatives operate. However, bedel plays a more overt role in these initiatives’ approach to social welfare than it does in centrally organized public social assistance programs. This difference can be traced to the categories and vocabularies that Kurdish movement-led initiatives use as well as to their practices of beneficiary selection. The dissertation traces the ways in which bedel is incorporated into the workings of Kurdish movement-led welfare programs and illustrates how this incorporation opens up room for the nurturing of resistant subjectivities and socialities that challenge the hegemonic debt morality in Turkey as well as the political and economic dispossession it entails. I thus argue that incorporation of bedel in Kurdish initiatives politicizes welfare and constitutes an obstacle to the Turkish state’s establishing and maintaining its sovereign power in the Kurdish region by means of welfare governance.

The dissertation contributes to broad theorizations of power and statecraft, redistribution and dispossession, and political conflict in the Middle East. These lines of inquiry have dominated social sciences for decades, but they have often remained separated. This disconnect obscures the close connections between governmental practices and the workings of sovereign power, preventing us from accounting for the moral and economic dynamics that inform political conflicts. I take debt as both an empirical object and an epistemological vantage point to bring these literatures together and offer different historical and ethnographic strategies of analyzing the state, political subjectivities and their conflictual construction.

This dissertation examines the translation and printing of the Qur'an in the late Ottoman Empire and the early years of the Republic of Turkey (1820-1938). As most Islamic scholars deem the Qur'an inimitable divine speech, the idea of translating the Qur'an has been surrounded with concern since the first centuries of Islam; printing aroused fears about ritual purity and threatened the traditional trade of the scribes. This study examines how Turkish Muslims challenged these concerns and asserted the necessity to print and translate the Qur'an in order to make the text more accessible.

With the spread of the printing press and literacy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Qur'an translations have become increasingly important as means of transmitting the meaning of the text to expanding audiences. I investigate the rise of Qur'an translation through a historical survey of Ottoman and Turkish language translations and an examination of the debates surrounding them waged in periodicals, government archives, and monographs. While Turkish translations have often been construed as a product of nationalism, I argue that the rise of translation began with a renewed emphasis on the Qur'anic theme of intelligibility bolstered by the availability of printed books, the spread of state schools, and increased knowledge of European history and intellectual currents. Turkish nationalists later adopted and advocated the issue, reconstruing the "Turkish Qur'an" as a nationalist symbol.

Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the meaning of Qur'an translation itself has changed and incorporated a variety of new concerns. Asserting translation of the Qur'an in the late Ottoman Empire became synecdoche for a new vision of Muslim authority and modernity that reduced the role of the ulama and created space for interpretive plurality on an unprecedented scale. Meanwhile, some Turkish intellectuals came to appreciate the symbolic value of Turkish renderings for the assertion of national identity in the Islamic sphere. While the notion of translation as replacement has withered, in practice, translations have come to play a robust role in Turkish Muslim life as supplement and counterpoint to the Qur'anic text.

Turkish-Western relations have undergone a tremendous transformation over the last five years. This relationship has at times produced vast amounts of cooperation, while at other times, tension and non-cooperation has occurred. Recently, as Turkey has risen economically, politically, and militarily, there has been much concern that the "model of democracy" in the Middle East" is moving towards political Islam, which has created speculation that Turkey is leaving behind its "Western" allies to pursue a foreign policy of "neo-Ottomanism". To achieve an understanding for the conditions where cooperation should occur in Turkish-Western relations, this paper will first correct the term "neo-Ottomanism" in the literature on Turkish foreign policy by updating it with the "new" audience costs of "neo-Ottomanism" and upgrading it to "neo-Ottomanism 2.0". A decision-model will be created using a comparative historical analysis that designates the new audience costs associated with "neo-Ottomanism 2.0" by reimaging contemporary Turkish politics and constructing a theory around how audience costs at the domestic level of politics incurs costs on the current Turkish government that makes cooperation at times less likely given the intensity of an issue. By doing such, this paper will demonstrate when cooperation should occur between the West and Turkey and when the audience costs associated with "neo-Ottomanism 2.0" are not high enough that they will weaken the government's hold on power