Dept. of Political Science and Public Administration - Ph.D. / Sc.D.
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Browsing Dept. of Political Science and Public Administration - Ph.D. / Sc.D. by Subject "Accountability"
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Item Open Access Democratic Party and democracy in Turkey : with special reference to Celal Bayar and Adnan Menderes(Bilkent University, 2011) Sütçü, GülizThis study aims to analyze the conceptualization of democracy by Celal Bayar and Adnan Menderes. Given the basic assumption of this dissertation, which is that ‘political agency’ is the decisive factor for the democratization path of a country, it is particularly concerned with Bayar’s and Menderes’ conceptualization of democracy. Since they were the main figures of Turkish politics between the year 1945, when the transition decision to democracy was made, and the year 1960, when the Democratic Party government was overthrown by the Turkish military, it is important to examine the understanding of democracy that shaped their political actions and decisions in order to understand the extent to which they contributed to Turkish democracy. Taking the agency approach as its theoretical background, this dissertation analyzes their political discourse and praxis based on the distinction between minimalist and maximalist democracy. While the minimalist dimension emphasizes the vertical accountability dimension of democracies and finds the presence of the electoral dimension of political regimes sufficient to define a regime as democratic, the maximalist dimension additionally considers the horizontal accountability dimension and takes the political opposition aspect as interdependent with vertical accountability, and thus as an indispensable aspect of democracies. This analysis is made using the minutes of the Turkish Grand National Assembly and group meetings of the Democratic Party, selected newspapers and periodicals of the period, speeches and articles of Bayar and Menderes, and the biographies written by their friends or journalists. In addition to the data gathered through these written sources, data collected through interviews with people that witnessed the period is also used. All data is categorized under these two main dimensions of democracy and analyzed according to the extent to which these two dimensions of democracy can be considered crucial for these two political leaders’ understanding of democracy. The analysis of the political discourse and praxis of Bayar and Menderes indicates that Bayar and Menderes accepted both vertical and horizontal dimensions of democracy. However, they did not see them as interdependent and they attached priority to the vertical accountability dimension. Thus, as they disregarded the horizontal accountability dimension, it is found that democracy came under threat and finally collapsed.Item Open Access The role of legislative committees in parliamentary governments’ accountability: a comparative analysis of the United Kingdom and Turkey(Bilkent University, 2018-06) Bektaş, Ümmühan EdaPresent study examines the role of legislative committees in single party majority and coalition governments’ accountability in the U.K. and Turkey. The literature discusses both legislatures’ contribution to policymaking as “marginal” or “ineffective” vis-a-vis governments, and their committees are expected to reflect this tendency. This approach equates formal capabilities (potential) with scrutiny behavior (influence), and claims that weak legislatures cannot substantially influence their governments’ legislation. In contrast, this research argues that legislative committees function as accountability mechanisms when they activate their formal capabilities and change the content of government bills. Rather than a description of formal capabilities, this study uses scrutiny powers and committee amendments as direct empirical measures to estimate the impact of legislative committees on governments. It also argues that committees’ scrutiny of government bills depends on the government control over the committees changing according to government type. The overall findings based on an original dataset suggest that both in the U.K. and Turkey, legislative committees can and do amend the content of government bills, and their likelihood of making substantial amendments to government bills increases when they base their intervention on their scrutiny powers. In both cases, committees during the coalition government term were more open and inclusive to actors outside the parliament leading committees to be affected by this knowledge and information in their scrutiny of government bills. In contrast, committees during single majority government term remained majoritarian and based their amendments on the information provided by the government representatives in committees.