Season 1 Ep. 5 - Why Did Turkish Democracy Collapse

Charlotte Tate
From the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs at Middlebury College, this is New Frontiers. I’m Charlotte Tate, associate director of the Rohatyn Center. New Frontiers podcasts highlight research undertaken by Middlebury scholars and others, on matters of international and global concern.  Everything is fair game—from big tech, environmental conservation and global security—to religion, culture, and changing work patterns.

Today, Sebnem Gumuscu joins Mark Williams—director of the Rohatyn Center—to discuss the plight and demise of democracy in Turkey.

Mark Williams
Sebnem Gumuscu is an associate professor of political science and a faculty fellow at the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs here at Middlebury College. In her capacity as a faculty fellow, Professor Gumuscu co-directs the Rohatyn Center’s program on Global Trends in Autocracy and Democracy which is supported by the Cangiano Family, in memory of Leon M.  Cangiano Jr. Class of 1963. Much of her research has focused on political Islam, middle Eastern and north African politics, democratization, and democratic backsliding. Her first book, Democracy, Identity and Foreign Policy in Turkey, was published in 2014. Her second book, which is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press is titled Democracy or Authoritarianism: Islamist Governments in Turkey, Egypt, and Tunisia. Today I’m delighted Sebnem’s agreed to stop by to discuss a topic that’s related to this larger book project. It’s a recent article that appeared in the journal Party Politics. Professor Gumuscu co-authored this article with her colleague, Berk Esen, and it’s titled, Why did Turkish democracy collapse? A political economy account of AKP’s authoritarianism. Professor Gumuscu, welcome to New Frontiers.

Sebnem Gumuscu  
Thank you for having me, Mark.

Mark Williams
We’re glad you’re here. Let’s start with a little background. Can you tell us a little bit about Turkey’s political development, first of all. Was it always a democracy? Was it ever a truly vibrant democracy before the decay set in that you write about?

Sebnem Gumuscu
Yes. Turkey indeed has a history of multi-party politics since 1950. Modern Turkey is established as a republic in 1923 and it has become a full functioning well functioning democracy in 1950. If we are to use Huntington’s analogy of waves of democratization, that would actually put Turkey in the second wave of democratization that happened after the Second World War. That said, of course Turkish democracy had its certain shortcomings. Of course, many people who are somewhat familiar with Turkish politics would know that the Turkish military armed forces were quite active in politics. They held what we could call tutelary powers and they would actually check and balance the elected officials. And they would actually kind of act like guardian of the nation and would intervene in politics to redesign political institutions, rewriting constitutions, changing the electoral system to straighten things out. But what makes Turkey really interesting is that unlike many other cases where we see military interventions happening quite frequently, in the Turkish case, the armed forces did not stay and establish a military regime. They would come in, intervene, get rid of existing corrupt politicians as they see them, and then rewrite a constitution—a new constitution, and then design the electoral institutions, and then they would go back to their barracks, so to speak.

Mark Williams  
So, this is a very different type of scenario than an area of the world that I studied, which is Latin America, where militaries would intervene in politics and not always retreat back to the barracks. They would stay for a long time.

Sebnem Gumuscu
Exactly.

Mark Williams
Okay. Now your article claims that after about 60 years, six decades, Turkey’s democracy has basically collapsed and you know, honestly that’s a, a really bold claim. And so I want to know what’s your evidence to support this?

Sebnem Gumuscu
That’s a very good question. So we adopt Dahl’s criteria of democratic politics. Robert Dahl.  So he specifies couple things for minimum criteria for democracies like free, fair, regular elections, universal suffrage, of course, the right to run for office without much restrictions and fundamental civil liberties, such as freedom of speech, freedom of information and association. Without these civil liberties, it’s really hard to imagine a well-functioning democracy, free and fair elections of course. A closer look at Turkey reveals two things. Number one, civil liberties are systematically violated under the AKP government. And number two, elections are no longer free or fair. So we compiled data from the last decade to document all these violations of basic freedoms in Turkey and the ruling party’s actions that undermine the freeness and fairness of elections. Unlike Turkish democracy and how it functioned before AKP’s rise to power in 2002, we actually see elections are no longer fee or fair in the country. And free speech is very much systematically undermined. And also, the media, Turkish media is very much under the control of the government.

Mark Williams
So what you’re saying is that you see violations of two of the basic foundations of democracy that Robert Dahl had spoken of in his work. And you see that happening in Turkey.

Sebnem Gumuscu
Yes.

Mark Williams
Okay. Now another question, doesn’t this conclusion about the collapse of Turkish democracy, doesn’t this actually fly in the face of what we see happening on the ground, so to speak, in Turkey? Isn’t the president still an elected official? Isn’t parliament still in session? Are we really talking about a collapse of democracy? Are we talking more about perhaps a backsliding?

Sebnem Gumuscu
That is a really great question. And many people are actually puzzled by this particular observation. You have elections, quite regular elections, and you have a president that is elected in a free and fair election, at least in 2002. That’s how they came to power. And we have a parliament that is pretty much in session. They’re not actually canceled and the constitution is still there, right? And the constitution actually guarantees civil liberties and freedoms and democratic rights. All of this on paper looks quite democratic. But when it comes to the reality of democratic politics, we actually see over the past, maybe 10 to 15 years, there has been very incremental, gradual change in all of these institutions. And mostly, yes, elections are still there, they’re regular, but as I said, they’re not free or fair. So we have freedom of media and freedom of the press guaranteed in the constitution. But in reality the AKP actually controls about 90 percent of both public and private media. That’s huge, right?

Mark Williams
Ninety percent.

Sebnem Gumuscu
Exactly. That’s a rough estimate, but when you think about news coverage, you actually see, for example, President Erdogan having a public ceremony or some kind of speech for some reason, and all TV stations actually tune in and they cover his speech and you don’t have any other kind of, you know, news coverage for that except for maybe one or two network stations. And they’re very kind of, you know, small, not very well funded network stations, very much marginalized. You can imagine 90 percent of Turkish media is very much pro-government and they’re also resorting to black propaganda almost and fake news quite frequently to show that the opposition is a terrible option and the people should not ever actually even imagine or consider voting for them. So there is a huge unevenness, especially in the media landscape. So the opposition does not have a fair chance at winning the game, despite the fact that we have regular elections.
Mark Williams
So despite the fact that on paper, it looks like a democracy and it has the trappings and trimmings of a democracy, in practice it functions in ways that are patently anti-democratic.

Sebnem Gumuscu
Absolutely.

Mark Williams
Yes. Okay. Well, if Turkey’s democracy really has collapsed, I guess the question is, how did this happen? The government was elected. The government presumably was popular and won a mandate. So what transpired to bring this about?

Sebnem Gumuscu
Well, it’s a long process and it will take a long time to unpack. But of course, as you said, everything started with an election. And this is actually a quality or character of the most recent backsliding wave that we observe in multiple countries like in India, in Hungary, in Poland, even in the United States. These elected officials who subvert democracy, they come to power in a free and fair election, but once they’re in power, they start to subvert democracy very slowly, very incrementally. And they start to kind of, you know, make sure that most of these democratic rights and institutions work in their favor and at the expense of their competition. In the Turkish case, more specifically, maybe we can highlight two routes to democratic breakdown. Number one was the politicization of state institutions. Those state institutions like the judiciary, police forces, even tax authorities who were supposed to remain independent and nonpartisan, they have been increasingly politicized over the years. So the government basically took over these state mechanisms and turned them into weapons to sanction their opponents and also reward their own supporters.

Mark Williams
So by politicized, you mean they were used in opposition to the opponents.

Sebnem Gumuscu
Exactly. I can give an example, and that relates very much to what happened with the Turkish media, especially how private media ended up under a AKP control. Tax authorities I said were politicized and some people may, actually can even ask how is that even possible? When you have, for example, a big media company, a conglomerate, that controls multiple network stations and newspapers, you can basically send—and that’s exactly what the AKP government did—send tax auditors to these companies and start looking at their books. And what happened in 2009, when one of these big media companies were covering some corruption stories about the government, they received several auditors from the tax authorities. And these tax authorities decided that the company was actually evading their taxes. So they charged them with $3 billion of tax fines. That was basically more than the value of the entire company. So the company was actually forced to negotiate and settle with the government. One part of that settlement was to sell some of their newspapers and their network stations to pro-government businesses. That’s a very good example of how politicized state institutions can actually punish your opponents and also reward your supporters.

Mark Williams
That’s amazing and incredibly effective if you have an authoritarian bent. Well, if Turkey no longer has a genuine democracy, what kind of government does it have? What would we call this type of government?

Sebnem Gumuscu
In this paper, we use a concept that Steven Levitsky and Luke Way coined, and that is competitive authoritarianism. So that may sound a bit kind of oxymoronic. How a regime is competitive and authoritarian at the same time, this is a kind of a hybrid regime type, which actually has both democratic qualities and autocratic qualities at the same time. That’s why it’s competitive authoritarian. What makes it competitive is actually we still have regular elections. They’re not free or fair, but the government has to win those elections to come to power and to remain in power. And still there are some room for competition, despite the fact that the game is not fair and that competition is open to at least one part of the opposition. So we have multiple parties running in elections and we have multiple candidates running in presidential elections. So it’s really kind of a system where you have a bit of competition that is really not very fair. That makes it autocratic and democratic at the same time.

Mark Williams
And are you talking mostly about the federal level? What’s going on at the subnational levels in terms of competition and political power?

Sebnem Gumuscu
That’s a very good question. I would say that at least for a big part of the last 20 years, both local and national level elections were very much competitive and authoritarian at the same time. Recently however, in 2019, the opposition parties actually made significant advances at the local level, if not the national level.  I’m guessing that at this, kind of, for the AKP, it is much easier maybe to concede loss at the local level because yes, they lose significant resources at the local level. But losing the national government is much costlier and they would not necessarily accept that loss that easily.

Mark Williams
That’s the big prize, the national government. How does the approach that you take in this article towards the study of the breakdown of democracy, how does that differ from the way that scholars have studied this phenomenon in the past? And here, I’m really thinking about an earlier wave of research done back in the 1970s by people like Juan Lynn and Al Stephan, who took a close sort of systematic look at the breakdown of democratic regimes in different parts of the world. How does your approach differ from that which they took?

Sebnem Gumuscu
We spent some time thinking about existing scholarship on democratic breakdown and backsliding. And if I do not misremember this, Lynn and Stephan put maybe more emphasis on political leadership rather than what we do here in terms of coalition. So we agree that political leadership matters greatly and leaders play an important role in undermining and subverting democracy, but when it comes to broader support for those leaders, actor-centric approaches do not necessarily explain the entire picture. Here we’re kind of, you know, trying to bring in the society as well into the equation. Because it’s not just about elected leaders, but also their supporters.

Mark Williams
And so what do you call the approach that you utilize?

Sebnem Gumuscu  
We call this a coalitional approach. We look at electoral coalitions and political coalitions that these leaders build. It’s a political economy understanding of coalitions, of course, but you can imagine there may be other ways to build coalitions around social values, perhaps ethnical religious identities. So in this paper, we’re explicitly subscribing to a political economy understanding of coalition building.

Mark Williams
And so what kind of analytical leverage does a coalitional approach provide you?

Sebnem Gumuscu
There’s a huge debate in the scholarship about the most recent wave of democratic back siding and breakdown. And some scholars say that it’s the elite that is the responsible party here. As many other scholars have done in the past. So it’s Trump, Erdogan, Modi, Orban, Putin that actually undermine and subvert democracy. And then some other scholars actually say, it’s really not about these people, these leaders, but the people who support them, the masses and their political attitudes and interests that we need to understand. So there’s an ongoing debate in the scholarly circles about who’s to blame, so to speak, right? We tend to hope that in this particular approach, we’re bringing the two together.

Mark Williams
I was going to ask you, do you feel that it is really this dichotomous? That it’s ither, or?

Sebnem Gumuscu
Yes, exactly. We think that it’s both, and they work together because political leaders build coalitions, but these coalitions then keep those political leaders in power. So they do not only vote them in office, but they also keep supporting them later in the elections, despite the fact that they see these leaders are subverting democracy. So there, we need to understand at one point the masses or the coalitions that all these leaders build, keep supporting these leaders, despite everything. That also tells us that at the end of the day, masses practically favor their own interests and their expectations from the government and certain policies that deliver them certain goods over their democratic commitments. They’re contingent democrats, not real democrats.

Mark Williams
Well, that’s really interesting. In a nutshell, could you tell us what the essential argument is that you make in your paper regarding the breakdown of democracy in Turkey?

Sebnem Gumuscu
Once the AKP came to power, the leader, of course, of the party, Erdogan along the two main groups in the society built a very tight coalition. Those two groups are the businesspeople and the urban poor. Both of these groups are very much dependent on the governing party, ruling party, for certain privileges. For the urban poor, this is social security assistance, social welfare policies, and specific clientelistic connections to the party. You can imagine urban poor, especially living in big cities like Istanbul and Ankara, they have certain needs. And they need jobs. They need connections. They need networks. And they also need very specific goods like food, food stamps and, and whatnot. What the party actually kind of politicized over the years as well. So if you’re an AKP supporter, you get all of these goods and benefits. And if you’re not an AKP supporter, you’re completely shut down and excluded from all of these distributions. And the same goes for businesspeople. Businesspeople who have close connections to the government actually receive significant favors in public procurement projects, for instance, and AKP is really great in public procurement projects and especially big projects like, you know, big bridges, you know, highways and whatnot, you know, significant redistribution of resources from the public budget to businesspeople who have been taking all these projects. So if you have close ties to the government, you’re favored and you’re given all these very long-term projects that are not in Turkish currency in U.S.  dollars. And they’re enormously beneficial for the recipients.

Mark Williams
Can I stop you right there for a moment? I can understand how contracts and no bid contracts could be awarded to friends and to consorts and so forth by incumbents. Could you help us understand how it is that public goods, food and other types of basic necessities can be systematically denied to those who are not supporters of AKP? How is that regulated? What’s the policy framework behind that, wherein you could ensure that only your supporters receive these benefits?

Sebnem Gumuscu
That’s a very good question. So I have done a little bit of field work at the local level. The AKP is perhaps the best organized party in Turkey. They have very strong grassroots existence in, presence, in neighborhoods, especially lower income neighborhoods. So they know people. They know who constitutes their support and they’re organized even at the polling station level. They know every individual person, every citizen and whom they vote for. And this is exactly what they told me in interviews that I have done in the past. You can actually kind of imagine them knowing more or less, who is an AKP supporter, who is on the fence and who an opposition voter. Some voters are white, some voters are black, the opposition, and some are gray. They basically allocate these resources to the people who have strong connections to the party and they can rely on for their support. And then we have the gray people who actually can go either way. So they also spend some resources for them as well to sway them.

Mark Williams
Are we talking about individuals receiving these benefits, or are we talking about the benefits being targeted towards neighborhoods or regions?

Sebnem Gumuscu  
Both actually. They are organized at the neighborhood level and regional and neighborhood level. And then within neighborhoods, they know what families are actually supportive of AKP and what families are actually against them, very much geared towards individuals and they select their own supporters and channel resources to them.

Mark Williams
Okay. Now let’s circle back and get to the way in which this coalition, which was created, the way in which it worked to destabilize democracy and to degrade the democracy.

Sebnem Gumuscu
So here, I think the key thing to remember is Turkey was a parliamentary system until 2017. When the AKP changed the system to a presidential system. Which means, in parliamentary systems we don’t have term limits. The same party can be reelected multiple times without any restrictions. That’s exactly what happened. The AKP came to power in 2002 and remained in power since then. And over the course of 20 years, they cultivated very strong ties with both businesspeople and urban poor. And both of these groups ended up being really, really dependent on the government for these privileges. And you can also imagine there has been a lot of corruption, especially between the government and the businesspeople in their, you know, handling of public procurement and whatnot. When you think about a very long-lasting relationship for 20 years, you can also imagine how much benefits have been accumulated by these different groups and how much corruption they’re involved in. Right. So deep, deep corruption we’re talking about. That means the cost of losing power now for the urban poor, for businesspeople, and the party itself has increased substantially. If they lose power, it’s very likely that they will be brought before courts because they have engaged in so much corruption, and many of the dealings that they had with the government were basically kind of extra-legal. Urban poor has not been involved in corruption perhaps, but they’re definitely at the receiving end of significant redistribution. So they fear that if government changes hands, then the new government will not give them these select benefits and privileges that they have been receiving from the AKP. All of these different components, different parts of the coalition have a lot to fear. They fear losing power to the opposition who actually is—sounds quite, maybe—radical in their desire to kind of bring some of these connections to the court and cutting those ties between the businesspeople and the government, and perhaps even revising the entire clientelistic network that the AKP built over the years. So all of these actors have a lot to lose. If they lose power, they will be losing a lot.

Mark Williams
So the incumbents then have a strong incentive to really repress opposition and to preclude agency on the part of opponents. And the clients, the businesses, and the urban masses have strong incentive to continue to support the incumbents as well as to tolerate the repression.

Sebnem Gumuscu
Exactly.

Mark Williams
What about other cases of democratic breakdown? Let’s think about the argument you’re making here in Turkey. Does it have legs? Can it travel to other cases and help explain what we might see in countries beyond Turkey?

Sebnem Gumuscu
Absolutely. As you’ve just beautifully summarized, the mechanism is very much clear and can easily travel to other cases. And that mechanism is about those people who are in power, they fear losing that power and they have incentives to cheat, and they also have incentives to support an actor that actually subverts democracy. If you have similar coalitions elsewhere in the world that represent some of these actors in the society, as well as among the political elite, they can actually be okay by cheating. And they may have incentives to support those who cheat. That will be actually end of democracy in many different parts of the world. So we believe that if not the same structure or same relationship between businesspeople, the ruling party, and urban poor, even if that does not travel to other cases, it is very possible that the causal mechanism itself that starts with fear and then leads to subversion of democracy can very well travel to other cases.

Mark Williams
That’s really interesting. And it’s actually very scary for people who look fondly on democracy. I’d like to take the discussion in a slightly different direction if we could. Given what we’ve lived through in the United States, particularly since 2016 and given your own expertise on democratic decay, do you think that Americans should be concerned about the state of their democracy?

Sebnem Gumuscu
I think so. Many people, I believe, were relieved with 2020 elections, but—there’s a but there—if we are to understand why Donald Trump was elected first time around, and despite all of his failures he received many more votes in 2020 elections, we need to see the coalition there. That there is indeed both a factor or an element in the political elite, as well as the society that forms a coalition of sorts, who have certain anxieties, who have certain fears about politics. Perhaps they fear and many scholars like people Norris and Ronald Ingelhart, in their book Cultural Backlash, or Yascha Mounk in his book The People vs. Democracy, they highlighted these anxieties, especially in the American context. So we can perhaps argue that there is a similar coalition of sorts that have certain anxieties have certain fears and they want to remain in power and they cannot tolerate their political rivals any longer. They’re ready to cheat and change things if they need to. And we, unfortunately, we see signs of these, you know,

Mark Williams
I think we see more than signs. We see actual concrete evidence toward subverting, the democratic process.

Sebnem Gumuscu
January 6th insurrection was a very good example that Donald Trump …

Mark Williams
Planned well in advance.  Planned well in advance.

Sebnem Gumuscu
We can also perhaps look at what happened since 2020 elections and many multiple states have changed their electoral laws and getting ready for another election. And they don’t want to lose that election. And they’re kind of creating an uneven playing field as we speak to make sure that they will not be losing another election. And that’s very scary.

Mark Williams
That sad dynamic is playing out on multiple fronts in multiple states as we record this podcast episode. It is scary. You’re right.

Sebnem Gumuscu
And I think that coalition will not fizzle out. There is a coalition there, 70-some million people voted for Donald Trump. And even if Trump is gone, there will perhaps be another person who will be carrying the same banner for this part of society. It’s really about what they want, what these people want, and what kind of values and interests they’re rallying around. The really scary thing is they really do not see their political rivals as legitimate actors. And they do not want to tolerate them. They don’t want to live with them in the same political arena.

Mark Williams
It is scary. It’s sad to see that development deepen and spread and solidify. I have a three-parter that I’d like to ask if I may. You are a native of Turkey, right?

Sebnem Gumuscu
Yes.

Mark Williams
Okay, part one. What part of Turkey did you grow up in, part two. And how did you wind up at Middlebury here in Vermont?

Sebnem Gumuscu
I’m born and raised in Istanbul. I spent perhaps 20-some years there and I went to college in Istanbul. It was a small liberal arts college like Middlebury. And it was a beautiful college that had actual—we had the opportunity to have a lot of conversations about political science, international relations—that  was my major. And I had couple American professors there who encouraged me and my friends to study in the United States. I was fascinated with political science, and I was not ready to stop studying political science at all when I graduated. So I applied for a Fulbright fellowship. I got it. And then I moved to Virginia to get my master’s degree and PhD. That’s my encounter with the U.S. for the first time.  Then the American academia was so vibrant, so fascinating, I wanted to stay here. And I wanted to work here. And I went back to Turkey for field work and writing my dissertation. But then in 2013, I was looking for jobs. There was an open position at Middlebury. I applied, got here and I’m glad I did.

Mark Williams   
Well, we’re glad you’re here as well, Sebnem. Very much so. Again, with a personal question, as a political scientist, how do you keep your objectivity when studying your country of origin? How do you prevent love of country or patriotism, your feelings for home, cloud your analysis of what might be going on politically in Turkey?

Sebnem Gumuscu
That’s a very good question. It was hard because I’m a citizen and a researcher at the same time. And I have my normative commitments. You know, I like democracy. I want democracy to flourish in the United States, in Turkey, and everywhere in the world, if it makes sense. But I think I’m good with compartmentalizing. And it also gives me some relief to be able to isolate myself from political developments. Like, you know, that concerns me as an individual, as a citizen. You know, okay, lot,s happening in Turkey with respect to autocratization, but studying it, gives me a little bit of distance and makes it easier for me to understand.

Mark Williams
In a way less painful to see this?

Sebnem Gumuscu
Exactly. It becomes less dreadful and less painful, less emotionally charged. Taking on that kind of analytical lens makes it easier for me to get out of that emotional state, and see it as a kind of a rational lens and make sense of what’s going on.

Mark Williams
I can completely understand what you’re talking about. In terms of research, then what’s next for you? The article that we’ve been discussing was published back in 2020. Are you continuing to do research in this general area? Or do you have a new project that’s in the works?

Sebnem Gumuscu
Well, I’m working on multiple projects currently. I don’t want to bore you with them.

Mark Williams
Tell us about at least one of them. What can we look forward to reading from you down the line?

Sebnem Gumuscu
Well, I’m really excited about one book project that I’ve been thinking of lately and I will be starting field work this summer. So it is actually about the decline of the ruling party in Turkey. I know maybe it’s too soon to talk about their decline, but I think we’re getting closer and closer, especially with the ongoing economic crisis in the country. I’m hoping to write a book on the rise and fall of the AKP. And for that I will be again doing some field work this summer in lower income neighborhoods in Istanbul talking to lower income families.

Mark Williams
These would be families who typically would be supporters of AKP?

Sebnem Gumuscu
Exactly. I want to ask what changed for them, if anything, over the last couple of years, with higher rates of inflation, about 60 percent as we speak, and rising unemployment, and stagnant economic growth that particularly hit the lower income families really hard.

Mark Williams
Wow. Well, I look forward to reading the book and presumably some of the articles that come from this research. Thank you very much for taking time to visit with us today; I’ve really enjoyed chatting with you. We’ve been talking about the breakdown of democracy in Turkey with Middlebury College Associate professor of Political Science Sebnem Gumuscu. Sebnem, again, thanks so much for visiting us here on New Frontiers.

Sebnem Gumuscu
Thank you for having me.

Outro
Vera Rousseff
Growing in Instanbul, Prof. Sebnem Gumuscu won several high school awards for her short stories and poems.  She enjoys cooking and trying new recipes and is always experimenting with sugarfree options. A hobby she picked up over COVID is building miniature rooms and houses from kits, similar to a dollhouse. Outside of class students often see her on her campus walks.