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" Who Rules Turkey Between 1980 and 2008? Business Power and the Rise of Authoritarian Populism "
Deniz, Mehmet Baki
Gates, Leslie
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Latin Dissertation
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| Language of Document
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English
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| Record Number
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1053066
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| Doc. No
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TL52183
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| Main Entry
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Deniz, Mehmet Baki
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| Title & Author
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Who Rules Turkey Between 1980 and 2008? Business Power and the Rise of Authoritarian Populism\ Deniz, Mehmet BakiGates, Leslie
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| College
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State University of New York at Binghamton
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| Date
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2019
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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2019
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| Note
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204 p.
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| Abstract
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How do populists consolidate an authoritarian regime in previously liberal democratic societies? How do such authoritarian populists overcome institutional opposition to their rule? I examine one instance of a new generation of authoritarian populists - anti-establishment/anti-elite leaders who dismantle liberal democratic institutions and usher in authoritarian politics. I examine the authoritarian turn of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party-AKP in Turkey. Erdoğan’s authoritarianism came in the post-2008 period, five years after November 2002 when he came to power. AKP’s triumph over dissenting bureaucrats, especially those in the judiciary and the military, between 2006-2008 paved the way for populist authoritarianization. Instead of taking Erdoğan’s defeat of the opposing bureaucrats as the cause for later authoritarianism as many have, I ask: How did the AKP manage to defeat the bureaucratic opposition? With 22 Interviews with former AKP ministers, business leaders and bureaucrats, and a systematic review of newspaper reporting on state-business relations, I establish that the EU-US oriented neoliberal businesses represented by two business associations, TUSIAD and TOBB, supported AKP at this juncture and explain why they did. Without the critical support of TUSIAD and TOBB, AKP and Erdoğan would have ceased to exist in Turkish politics after 2008. This contradicts the widely held view that the so-called ‘Muslim businesses’ were crucial for AKP and Erdoğan to institute the authoritarian regime. Two issues explain TUSIAD and TOBB’s decision to support AKP and Erdoğan before 2008. First, they trusted that Erdoğan would follow their favored political-economic projects in the post-2008 period because a) they won all 16 policy battles I identified against the will of the rest of the business community and b) TUSIAD’s members gained the most economically, even from AKP’s rent distribution most assume went mostly to “Muslim businesses”. Second, TUSIAD and TOBB supported AKP because they feared losing their hegemony over Turkish politics. They feared a return to the 1990s when working class militancy and the neoliberal project split elites between competing projects and destabilized politics. TUSIAD and TOBB had reconsolidated their hegemony with AKP’s rise in 2002. They turned against the military-justice bureaucrats to defend their hegemony.
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| Descriptor
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Sociology
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Gates, Leslie
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State University of New York at Binghamton
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