Authoritarian Politics in Turkey: Elections, Resistance and the AKP

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President Erdogan's victory in the April 2017 referendum granted him sweeping new powers across Turkey. The constitutional reforms transform the country from a parliamentary democracy into a "Turkish style" presidential republic. Despite being democratically elected, Turkey's ruling AKP party has moved towards increasingly authoritarian measures. During the coup attempt in July 2016, the AKP government declared a state of emergency which Erdogan saw as an opportunity to purge the public sector of pro-Gulenist individuals and criminalise opposition groups including Kurds, Alevites, leftists and liberals. The country experienced political turmoil and rapid transformation as a result. This book identifies the process of democratic reversal in Turkey. In particular, contributors explore the various ways that a democratically elected political party has used elections to implement authoritarian measures. They scrutinise the very concepts of democracy, elections and autocracy to expose their flaws which can be manipulated to advantage. The book includes chapters discussing the roots of authoritarianism in Turkey; the political economy of elections; the relationship between the political Islamic groups and the government; Turkish foreign policy; non-Muslim communities' attitudes towards the AKP; and Kurdish citizens' voting patterns. As well as following Turkey's political trajectory, this book contextualises Turkey in the wider literature on electoral and competitive authoritarianisms and explores the country's future options.

Author Bio

Bahar Baser is a research fellow at the Centre for Peace, Trust and Social Relations at Coventry University and a visiting research fellow at the Security Institute for Governance and Leadership in Africa (SIGLA) at Stellenbosch University, funded by the National Research Foundation. She completed her PhD in social and political sciences at the European University Institute in Florence. Baser is the author of Diasporas and Homeland Conflicts (2015) and co-editor of Migration from Turkey to Sweden (forthcoming 2017). She has various publications in peer-reviewed academic journals, including Terrorism and Political Violence, Ethnopolitics and the International Journal of Kurdish Studies. Ahmet Erdi Ozturk is a research assistant in the Faculty of Law, Social Science and History at the University of Strasbourg, where he has also been based for his doctoral research. He has held a research fellowship at the Centre for Southeast European Studies at the University of Graz. He gained an MA from the Political Science Department, Hacettepe University and an MRes from the Political Science Department, Barcelona Autonoma University. Ozturk has recently published in Southeast European and Black Sea Studies (2016) the Yearbook of Muslims in Europe (2016) as well in academic and online journals, books and newspapers, including Birgun, The Conversation, Hurriyet Daily News, Open Democracy, T24 and Diken. He is the Turkey correspondent for EUREL (Sociological and Legal Data on Religions in Europe) and has been a regular guest on television programs such as France 24 to discuss Turkish politics.