تقاسم السلطة : التحدي الذي يواجه التحول الديمقراطي في تركيا

Abstract EN

Afer a major wave of democratization over the last decade, the stalemate in Turkey’s reform process and the rising concerns about ‘creep-ing authoritarianism’ under the ruling AKP government attracted the at-tention of many scholars.

How could Turkey manage to achieve substan-tial progress in democratization over the last ten years and why has the current government lost its reformist spirit? Tis article seeks to answer these questions by developing a multi-dimensional, holistic approach that tries to integrate structures and actors, domestic and external forces, rath-er than singlemindedly focusing on certain aspects whilst downplaying other crucial elements from the perspective of comparative democratization studies Turkey con-stitutes an unusual case.

It is an example of a “second wave” democracy.Te transition From the single party, soft-authoritarian regime of the in-ter-war period was accomplished several decades ago in the 1950s.

Yet, in spite of major reform experiments, notably during the course of the early part of the past decade, democracy remains far from being consolidated.

Indeed, inter-national comparisons such as data based on Freedom House Surveys tend toclassify Turkey as a “hybrid regime,” whose standing is signifcantly low com-pared to many third wave democracies in Latin America, Eastern Europe, andelsewhere.

In retrospect, Turkey has succeeded in terms of establishing “elec-toral” or “procedural” democracy, but has failed in terms of generating “sub-stantive” democracy based on a genuinely pluralistic political order.

Turkishsociety and politics remains deeply divided and there are increasing concerns voiced by liberal intellectuals both at home and abroad about the endurance of authoritarian elements in the Turkish political system, going even as far sug-gesting that the diferences between Erdoğan’s Turkey and Putin’s Russia may not be as clear-cut as they may have appeared only a few years ago