Governance crises and resilience of authoritarian populism: 2023 Turkish elections from the perspective of Hirschman’s ‘exit, voice, and loyalty’

The May 2023 elections in Turkey are puzzling because public support for President Erdoğan did not erode despite political-economic failures of considerable magnitude. The economy was ailing, the government’s performance in containing natural disasters was dismal, and oscillations in foreign policy were perplexing. Yet, Erdoğan managed to win elections once again, giving him the mandate to continue ruling the country over the next five years. What explains this political outcome in the face of ‘multiple governance crises’? We adopt Albert O. Hirschman’s ‘exit, voice, and loyalty’ framework to explain the multiple but interrelated sources of the resilience of authoritarian populism in Turkey. We suggest the ‘exit, voice, and loyalty’ equilibrium in the 2023 Turkish elections requires an integrated analysis along two dimensions, each interacting with and mutually reinforcing the other: the economy-identity nexus and the domestic-external nexus

Europe and the impasse of centre-left politics in Turkey: Lessons from the Greek experience

[No abstract available

Global crisis, national responses: the political economy of Turkish exceptionalism

With its dilatory and piecemeal fiscal activism and uncharacteristic aversion to IMF assistance, the Turkish government’s response to the global economic crisis of 2008–9 diverged considerably from prevalent trends in other major emerging market countries. Underlying this intriguing pattern were Turkey’s pre-existing policy and macroeconomic constraints, cognitive lapses on the part of policymakers, and the conjunctural dynamics of domestic politics. The interplay of these factors progressively narrowed the policy space for vigorous action, leading to a motley combination of reactive initiatives that neither offered sufficient protection to vulnerable social groups nor promised sustainable growth in the long run despite rapid short-term recovery

The global economic crisis and the future of neoliberal globalization: rupture vs. continuity

This article outlines the main elements of rupture and continuity in the global political economy since the global economic crisis of 2008-2009. While the current calamity poses a more systemic challenge to neoliberal globalization than genetically similar turbulences in the semi-periphery during the 1990s, we find that evidence for its transformative significance remains mixed. Efforts to reform the distressed capitalist models in the North encounter severe resistance, and the broadened multilateralism of the G-20 is yet to provide effective global economic governance. Overall, neoliberal globalization looks set to survive, but in more heterodox and multipolar fashion. Without tighter coordination between old and emerging powers, this new synthesis is unlikely to inspire lasting solutions to pressing global problems such as an unsustainable international financial architecture and the pending environmental catastrophe, and may even fail to preserve some modest democratic and developmental gains of the recent past

Persistence in regional voting patterns in Turkey during a period of major political realignment

Using province level data from five nationwide elections held during the past decade, we examine the main voting patterns in Turkey. By means of cluster analysis, we classify the 81 provinces according to vote shares of the major parties and independent candidates, and repeat this exercise for each election held between 1999 and 2009. We find that 3-way and 5-way partitions of the country adequately capture the main political cleavages in Turkey. While the conservative rightwing parties receive a plurality of votes in all regions of the 3-way partition, they receive significant challenge from left-wing and Turkish-nationalist parties in the west and the Kurdishnationalist parties in the east. In addition to these patterns, the 5-way partition brings out also shifts in the relative strength of the parties within each main division. Our results also show that, despite the major political realignment which occurred during the period under examination, the groupings of provinces remain mainly unchanged. Therefore, we construct “composite clusters” by classifying provinces in the group in which they appear the majority of the time. The distinct socio-economic and demographic characteristics of the composite clusters suggest that differences in social and economic structures lie at the root of differing regional political tendencies and their persistence