Politicized armies, militarized politics : civil-military relations in Turkey and Greece

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 2007.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 55-60).Despite their common Ottoman heritage, Greece and Turkey have diverged widely in their modem history of civil-military relations. The armed forces have a long record of intervention in both countries, but there is a crucial difference: the military emerged as a roughly unitary, independent political actor in Turkey, whereas in Greece it remained divided into factions aligned with civilian political parties through patronage relationships. This empirical observation is then used as a basis for an attempt at theory building. Several countries exhibit a pattern of military interventions more similar to Turkey and others to those found in Greece. Societies which developed a strong parliamentary tradition early in the modernization process also acquired organized civilian political groups with clientelist networks extending into the armed forces. On the contrary, in countries with limited or weak parliamentary development and strong security pressures, political activism was often channeled through the military, which emerged as a hotbed of political thinking, predating and pre-empting any civilian party tradition. The former type of civil-military relations was more commonly found in Southern European and Latin American countries while the latter was predominant in non-Western societies that resisted Western colonization.by Evangelos Liaras.S.M

Can electoral engineering save multiethnic democracy?

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, February 2010.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. [219]-244).The objective of this dissertation is to systematize the existing hypotheses in the electoral engineering literature and to test them in a set of selected case studies in order to answer a central question: does the electoral system affect the structure of political parties in ethnically divided societies and if so how? The academic debate on electoral design for divided societies has focused on the impact of institutional choices on ultimate conflict outcomes. The findings of previous studies have been generally inconclusive, while the lack of sub-national data on ethnic composition and voting patterns has made it difficult to examine mechanisms regarding the role of demographics. To approach the problem from a different angle, I propose a research design focusing on the intermediate link from electoral institutions to the ethnic structure of the party system. For the empirical portion of my work, I chose to conduct a structured historical comparison of four societies which implemented major electoral reforms: Turkey, Northern Ireland, Guyana, and Sri Lanka. Based on the study of these cases, I am arguing that politicians and voters have not responded to electoral incentives in the ways predicted by existent theories, and that no clear relationship can be observed between the electoral system's proportionality, the heterogeneity of electoral constituencies, and the number of parties or the types of ethnic appeals they make to voters. These findings indicate that the hopes placed in electoral system design for divided societies are unwarranted and that attention among political scientists and policymakers should shift to other peace-building approaches.by Evangelos Liaras.Ph.D

Turkey's Party System and the Paucity of Minority Policy Reform

An earlier version of this paper was presented in Workshop 9: ‘Changing Party Political Constellations and Public Policy Reform in Southern Europe’ at the Tenth Mediterranean Research Meeting, Florence & Montecatini Terme, 25-28 March 2009, organised by the Mediterranean Programme of the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute.The purpose of this paper is to explore the question of small and incremental reform in Turkish minority policies over the last two decades, contrasting with the dramatic economic, social, and political changes that the country has experienced over the same period. The main focus will be on two partly overlapping groups living in Turkey (Alevis and Kurds); comparison with other Southern European countries will be made as background reference. The reason for this focus is analytical: these two groups are structurally different from minorities found in Italy or Greece in that they are both large enough to carry great electoral weight and politically salient enough to affect Turkey's EU accession prospects. Minority policy is an often overlooked realm of public policy, either because it is considered too sensitive or too case-specific, as opposed to fiscal, labor, family, and immigration policy, which, at least in the European context, are now typically examined and compared by scholars on a more transnational framework. However, minority policy broadly defined (as the recognition and treatment of sections of the population identified as belonging to a special cultural heritage) touches upon a number of diverse policy areas including civil rights, education, regional development, relations between religion and state, language, culture, and national security. In Turkey minority policy in official discourse has historically been linked to the non-Muslim minorities protected by the Treaty of Lausanne, whereas Alevis and Kurds were traditionally accorded no special recognition under the Kemalist Republic. The first part of the paper attempts to theoretically situate minority policy in the context of competitive party politics. What is puzzling about Turkey is why given a climate of increased democratization and confidence after the suppression of the PKK insurgency, the Turkish party system has not been more responsive to the long-standing grievances of Kurds and Alevis. Partly based on existing literature, the author posits that a constellation of factors is necessary for policy reform on minority issues to proceed in a democratic system: the mobilization of the minority group(s) in question and either high external pressure on the state to satisfy minority demands or significant electoral competition for the minority's votes or participation in government of a party that monopolizes the minority vote and is ideologically committed to its agenda. The second part of the paper briefly discusses the history of state attitudes towards Kurds and Alevis in Turkey, as well as more recent developments including the reforms on Kurdish language rights, the abortive Çamuroğlu recommendations regarding Alevi pious foundations, DTP’s entry in parliament, and the constitutional amendment process launched by AKP. The third and final part of the paper explains why Turkey's party system for a long time lacked the necessary preconditions for more groundbreaking policy changes, underlining the importance of external pressure from the EU as an engine for reform.(Product of workshop No. 9 at the 10th MRM 2009)