Attitudes toward Wife Abuse of Police Officers and Judiciary Members in Turkey: Profession,Gender, Ambivalent Sexism and Sex Roles

This study examined the attitudes of police officers and judiciary members toward wife abuse in Turkey and the relation between these attitudes and profession, ambivalent sexism (hostile/benevolent sexism), gender, and gender roles. The following instruments were used for the analyses: The Attitudes Toward Wife Abuse Scale (AWAS), the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory (ASI), and the Bem Sex Role Inventory. The participants were 300 police officers and 150 judiciary members selected from different regions of Turkey. Results showed that compared to judiciary members, police officers are more tolerant of physical and verbal abuse of women in marriage, but less tolerant of the idea of the victim leaving an abusive marriage partner. Similarly, men were more tolerant than women of those husbands who physically and verbally abuse their wives, but less supportive of the wife leaving the abusive partner. Profession and ambivalent sexism (hostile/benevolent sexism) were found to be the strongest predictors of attitudes toward wife abuse.     

Party competition in the Middle East: spatial competition in the post-Arab Spring era

This paper charts the nature of political cleavage between major parties in post-Arab Spring elections in five Mediterranean region countries, with data from online opt-in surveys. We compare the Moroccan elections, held under a consolidated authoritarian regime, with the transitional cases of Tunisia and Egypt as well as the more mature democracies of Turkey and Israel. Voter opinions are obtained on 30 salient issues, and parties and voters are aligned along two dimensions. We trace country-specific cleavage patterns and reflections of party system maturity in these five countries. The cases of Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco reveal that in less settled cleavage structures there is little congruence between vote propensities for parties and agreement levels with policy positions compared to the more institutionalized democracies of Israel and Turkey where voters exhibit a higher likelihood to vote for a party as the distance between the voter and the party in the policy space gets smaller.     

Turkey’s ambivalent self: ontological insecurity in ‘Kemalism’ versus ‘Erdoğanism’

Abstract

This article aims to understand the ‘non-Western self’ and the different ways its ontological insecurity can manifest, through the example of Turkey, by contrasting Kemalism’s modernizing vision with Erdo?an’s current populism. We argue that the constructions of political narratives in Turkey (and by implication in other similar settings) derive from two interrelated aspects of the spatio-temporal hierarchies of (colonial) modernity: structural insecurity and temporal insecurity. Modern Turkey’s ontological insecurity was constructed spatially, on the one hand, as liminality and structural in-betweenness, and temporally, on the other, as lagging behind the modernization of the West. After discussing how Kemalism offered to deal with such insecurities in the twentieth century, we analyse the Justice and Development Party (AKP) period of the twenty-first century as an alternative attempted answer to these problems and explain why efforts to dismantle the Kemalist framework collapsed into its populist mirror image. The example of the Turkish case underlines the importance of focusing on the different ways in which the structural and temporal insecurities of ‘the non-Western self’ take shape at a given point and manner of entry into the modern international order.     

Functions of Social Representations in Honour Violence: The “Other East” as Responsible

Although extensive research has been carried out in the field of social justice in terms of femicide in defence of family honour around the globe, intersecting aspect of identity as an underlying psychological mechanism to justify the social sources of these killing has not been addressed in much detail. The present study, therefore, examined the role of (a) diverse social representations in femicide, (b) geography and ethnicity in social representations of honour violence, and (c) the functions of these diverse social representations in maintaining social injustice towards women through the promotion of occidentalism in line with the boundaries for a hegemonic notion of western modernisation. Two studies were conducted. The first study includes a content analysis investigating data from 73 respondents living in the western part of Turkey. The present findings showed that there are different social representations of honour killings, such as töre killings and namus killings. These diverse representations were found to reflect the fact that individuals delegitimise töre killings as eastern, outrageous, tribalistic, and related to family honour while legitimising namus killings as personal, valuable, self-aware, and vulnerable, in the context of “westernised” Turkey. The second study comprises an experimental design in which participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: namus killing, töre killing, and control. The results showed that diverse social representations of femicide have psychological functions such that a namus representation gives more legitimacy to femicide than does a töre representation. The consideration of diverse representations in honour killings and their functions has the potential to inform research as well as to build effective prevention policies targeting the reduction in femicides. A focus on the concept of namus and an emphasis on moving the focus of social representations away from responsible backwards, “the other East” and towards namus as one of the leading sources of domestic violence may switch the problem from the perception of victimised eastern women and to a general injustice problem.

     

The myth of ‘independent judiciary’: the evolution of judiciary-executive relations in Turkish politics

The position of judiciary in politics is an important area of discussion for both legal and political experts. The issue has particularly been on Turkish political agenda for the past decade with the emergence of a strong single-party government under the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalk?nma Partisi-JDP) rule. This article aims to analyse the evolution of relations between the judiciary and executive in Turkey from a historical perspective by examining the Republican era until the JDP rule. The struggle over the control of institutions becomes more visible during periods of strong government and the analysis shows that the idea of an independent, apolitical judiciary is a myth that was created by the institutional and legal design of the Republic in the Turkish case and is not peculiar to the JDP government.     

HYBRIDS AND PROFESSIONAL COMMUNITIES: COMPARING UK REFORMS IN HEALTHCARE,BROADCASTING AND POSTAL SERVICES

Many countries use state‐owned, for‐profit, and third sector organizations to provide public services, generating ‘hybrid’ organizational forms. This article examines how the hybridization of organizations in the public sector is influenced by interaction between regulatory change and professional communities. It presents qualitative data on three areas of the UK public sector that have undergone marketization: healthcare, broadcasting, and postal services. Implementation of market‐based reform in public sector organizations is shaped by sector‐specific differences in professional communities, as these groups interact with reform processes. Sectoral differences in communities include their power to influence reform, their persistence despite reform, and their alignment with the direction of change or innovation. Equally, the dynamics of professional communities can be affected by reform. Policymakers need to take account of the ways that implementation of hybrid forms interacts with professional communities, including risk of disrupting existing relationships based on communities that contribute to learning.