Table Of ContentCOMPARATIVE 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
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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
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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 encour-
agement. 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 sup-
port 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 pro-
ject, 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 pro-
ject, 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
