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COMPARATIVE STUDIES OF POLITICAL AGENDAS Political Stability, Democracy and Agenda Dynamics in Turkey Alper T. Bulut · T. Murat Yildirim Comparative Studies of Political Agendas Series Editors Christoffer Green-Pedersen Aarhus University Aarhus, Denmark Laura Chaqués Bonafont University of Barcelona Barcelona, Spain Arco Timmermans Leiden University The Hague, The Netherlands Frédéric Varone Université de Genève Geneva, Switzerland Frank R. Baumgartner University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Chapel Hill, USA The series publishes books on policy agenda-setting dynamics broadly understood. This includes for instance books dealing with the policy effects of agenda dynamics, the relationship between the political agenda, public opinion and the media agenda, and agenda dynamics in relation to particular issues. The series publishes both comparative books and books dealing with single countries if these single countries are placed in a comparative context. The books can be either monographs or edited volumes. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14908 Alper T. Bulut · T. Murat Yildirim Political Stability, Democracy and Agenda Dynamics in Turkey Alper T. Bulut T. Murat Yildirim Karadeniz Technical University University of Stavanger Trabzon, Turkey Stavanger, Norway Comparative Studies of Political Agendas ISBN 978-3-030-27457-3 ISBN 978-3-030-27458-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27458-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Alex Linch shutterstock.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland To Ela, for her unconditional love, dedication and support. —Alper T. Bulut To Işıl, without whom my life would be infinitely less rich. —T. Murat Yildirim A cknowledgements The Turkish Policy Agendas was born out of the desire of a group of graduate students and researchers based in the United States and Italy, who had no prior knowledge of each other, to compile Turkey’s first longitudinal data series on policy agendas. In early 2013, we contacted Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Jones to discuss the possibility of launch- ing the Turkish Policy Agendas. Our inquiry was met with great encouragement. After putting us in contact, they introduced us to a number of graduate students who took part in the data collection activities of the American Policy Agendas Project, with whom we had several meetings to discuss how we could incorporate the different institutional and political setting in Turkey into the Turkish codebook. The challenge ahead of us was hard to overestimate. After all, we were two graduate students who had no initial funding to hire coders and no prior experience in content coding. What encouraged us to take on this task was the amazing support we have received from the CAP community from day one. Over the past six years, Turkish Policy Agendas Project coded more than 100,000 records of data and set out to code more in the following years. We always believed that Turkey would be a good addition to the project, given that it might provide unique opportunities to explore the policy dynamics of policy agendas outside advanced democracies. When we launched the Turkish Policy Agendas Project, most of the country projects were advanced democracies with fairly stable politics. We were very confident that inclusion of Turkey would be a valuable addition to the project and would enable CAP scholars to explore agenda dynamics vii viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS under different political conditions. What we did not know was that the state agencies in Turkey did an invaluable job of preserving data on legis- lative activities and budgetary expenditure spanning a period of over 100 years which made our data collection efforts a lot easier and fairly more ambitious. We would like to thank the CAP community, from which we have learnt a lot over the past years. We have been fortunate to work with a number of outstanding colleagues such as Derek Epp, Herschel (Trey) Thomas, and Michelle Whyman who patiently answered our ques- tions about coding procedures in the process of developing the project, which led to a visiting research term at UT-Austin for one of us, a series of collaborative projects and numerous conference presentations. Among these experiences were the annual meetings of the Comparative Agendas Project (2013–2017), the Midwest Political Science Association (2014, 2016 and 2017); Southern Political Science Association (2014); Southwestern Political Science Association (2014); Empirical Studies in Political Analysis Workshop (2017, 2019), the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (2015), the Middle East Studies Association (2016), and the Conference of Budgeting Across Europe at Texas A&M University (2015). We benefited a lot from the comments and suggestions from the participants. We are grateful to the editors of the Comparative Studies of Political Agendas book series—Christoffer Green-Pedersen, Laura Chaqués Bonafont, Arco Timmermans, Frédéric Varone, and Frank R. Baumgartner for their feedback and encouragement throughout the process. We also thank Shaun Bevan for his invaluable help in construct- ing the most important problem dataset and his suggestions on our data collection efforts. Finally, we would like to acknowledge that our book would not be possible without the meticulous research assistance of Goker Bilgic, Gozde Ozsarsilmaz, Ali Senyurt, Mehmet Demirsoz, Irem Ozyer, Emel İlter, İlknur Doksanoğlu, Çağla Demirel, and Merve Uzuner. Goker Bilgic and Gozde Ozsarsilmaz played key roles particu- larly in the development of the datasets utilized in Chapters 3 and 6; we are truly impressed with their diligent work and enthusiasm in political science. We would also like to thank Emel İlter whose research assistance was vital in preparing Chapter 5. We are also grateful to the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy at the University of Missouri and the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa for giving us financial support to ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix compile our datasets. Laron K. Williams and L. Marvin Overby from the University of Missouri, and Jonathan B. Slapin from the University of Zurich were always supportive to us in the development of our project. We would also like to thank Chris Wlezien and James Adams for their invaluable comments on previous versions of Chapter 4 which we think significantly improved the chapter and the book. This is our first large-scale cooperation that makes use of the data we collected within the framework of the Comparative Agendas Project. Both of us think that we are fortunate to be able to complete this project amid the early career challenges facing us, and we attribute it to good teamwork as well as to wonderful people surrounding us much of the time. From data analyses to drafting the chapters, we shared the burden equally, and our names in the title are listed alphabetically. It is our hope that our joint effort contributes to the study of policy process in Turkey and elsewhere. Alper T. Bulut T. Murat Yildirim c ontents Part I Case, Data and Measurement 1 Introduction 3 2 Political Institutions and Policymaking in Turkish Politics 13 Part II Representation and Policy Responsiveness 3 The Effect of Public Opinion on Policymaking in Turkey 47 4 Do Turkish Parties Keep Their Promises? 97 5 Gender Differences in Policy Priorities Among Legislators 113 Part III Democratic Instability and Agenda Dynamics 6 The Dynamics of Policy Agenda, Issue Diversity, and Policy Change in Democratic and Non-democratic Times 131 7 Press-Party Parallelism and Media Agendas 155 xi