Authoritarian Politics in Turkey: Elections, Resistance and the AKP

Bahar Baser · Ahmet Erdi Öztürk

May 2017 · Bloomsbury Publishing

Ebook

288

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About this ebook

Despite being democratically elected, Turkey's ruling AKP party moved towards increasingly authoritarian measures in the years that followed. After the coup attempt in July 2016, the AKP government declared a state of emergency which President Erdo?an saw as an opportunity to purge the public sector of pro-Gülenist individuals and criminalise opposition groups including Kurdish separatists, Alevites, leftists and liberals. The country experienced political turmoil and rapid transformation, and debates around constitutional amendments began that would change the regime to a “Turkish style” presidential system. This book identifies the process of democratic reversal in Turkey. In particular, contributors explore the various ways that a democratically elected political party 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.

About the author

Ahmet Erdi Öztürk is assistant professor of politics and international relations at London Metropolitan University. Dr. Öztürk will also be Marie Curie Individual Fellow in Coventry University (UK) and GIGA (Germany) between 2021-2023 Dr. Öztürk was a Swedish Institute Doctoral and Post-Doctoral Fellow at Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society (REMESO), at Linkoping University between 2017 January-2019 January and Post-Doctoral Scholar in Residence at the University of Notre Dame's Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies in 2019 and he is also EUREL's (Sociological and Legal Data on Religions in Europe and Beyond) Turkey correspondent since 2016. Dr. Öztürk received his PhD in Political Science at the University of Strasbourg with the highest distinction (Exceptionnel) with his dissertation titled “Religion Identity and Power: Turkey's Desire of Domination in the Balkans under the AKP rule” as of November 2018. His work has been published in Politics and Religion, Journal of European Political Science, Religion, Ideology and Politics, Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, Journal of Critical Studies on Terrorism, Oxford Bibliographies, Journal of Research and Politics on Turkey, Muslim Yearbook and Journal of Balkan and Near East Studies. He is a regular contributor to media outlets such as Open Democracy, The Conversation, Huffington Post and France 24.

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