Browsing by Subject "Turkish Democracy"

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Open Access
Democratic Party and democracy in Turkey : with special reference to Celal Bayar and Adnan Menderes
(2011) Sütçü, Güliz
This 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.
Open Access
Political party elites and the breakdown of democracy: the Turkish case,1973-1980
(1998) Demirel, Tanel
This study aims to analyze the behavior of Turkish political party elites during the 1973-1980 period. It is particularly concerned with the extent to which political party elites seemed to have contributed to the breakdown of Turkish democracy in 1980. It starts from the assumption that breakdown of democracies is not determined by structural factors alone, however important they might be. Political actors, particularly those who professed commitment to a democratic regime, have a space for manuevre so as to lessen the unfavourable effects of these structures. It is argued that trials and tribulations of the Turkish democracy can be understood better if they are examined within the broader social-political framework in which it evolved, a framework which has both generated constraints and provided opportunities for political actors. At its simplest, that broader framework can be said to have consisted of the complex encounter and interaction of Ottoman-Turkish strong state tradition and traditional social structure undergoing modernisation process. It is concluded that, although the interaction in question did not create particularly favourable soil for democracy to flourish, it certainly did not mean that democracy was doomed to fail in the 1980. Political party elites did have room for manuevre so as to affect the constraining conditions and to enhance the efficacy, effectiveness and therefore legitimacy of the democratic regime. The principal argument of the thesis is that political party elites, far from taking such a course of action, through their actions and non-actions -particularly their reactions to problem of terrorism and economic crisishave done much to undermine the belief in the democratic system and paved the way to its breakdown in 1980.