Taking Sides: Determinants of Support for a Presidential System in Turkey*

A key issue on the Turkish political agenda concerns a transition to presidentialism, with a constitutional amendment proposal submitted in December 2016. While the positions of political elites are well known, we lack a detailed analysis of the electorate’s views on such a transition. To fill this gap, we present cross-sectional and panel data collected over the period from spring 2015 to winter 2015–16. Partisanship emerges as the key factor shaping views on presidentialism, and reflections of the centre–periphery cleavage in Turkish politics are also visible. The shift of the Turkish nationalist constituency’s views in favour of presidentialism has been a significant trend in the aftermath of the June 2015 general election.     

Transnational Firms and the Knowledge Structure: The Case of the Walt Disney Company

This paper demonstrates how the study of knowledge can strengthen the analysis of transnational corporations and globalisation through the case of the Walt Disney Company. Disney is emblematic because its prosperity is founded on both global and intergenerational reception, integration and consumption of its products and its imageries. Its transnational preponderance is observed by taking into account its socio-economically grounded power, its intertwined material and ideational universes and its multilayered knowledge structuring. Based on cultural studies methods, world-economy theories and sociological conceptual tools, we assess the Disney Company's ability to structure collective imagination, to orient behaviour and to favour new practices through its media contents, its entertainment activities and its diversified by-products. Consequently, this makes it possible to consider the material and ideational extent of the power of the company. Finally, the specific aspects of the knowledge structure are stressed, particularly its inherent inertia, its geo-cultural dynamics, its co-evolution with material structures and its polarisation around specific symbols, narratives and objects. By doing so, this research contributes to the intersection between the new field of Cultural Political Economy and International Political Economy in the context of globalisation of ideas and identities.