Where the Low Road and the High Road Meet: Flexible Employment in Global Value Chains

This article examines production organisation and employment patterns in the export-orientated centres of Denizli (Turkey) and Tiruppur (India). It argues that Denizli and Tiruppur's involvement in global value chains has resulted in segmented production patterns and insecure employment arrangements. Larger producers use sub-contractors as a strategy to mediate the instability of international contracts and pass the uncertainty in their global linkages on to smaller firms and their workforces. Such flux, then, has become a regularised feature of manufacturing work within the ranks of sub-contractors. Employers have solidified these production arrangements by recruiting rural and female workers. The article sheds light on the relationship between new production forms and rising employment insecurity.     

Religious parties and democracy: A comparative assessment of Israel and Turkey

Discussions of the role of religious parties in democracies can be highly misleading when they take the parties' ideologies at face value and assign them to the binary categories of moderate vs radical. Only by a careful review of how religious parties use religious and secular symbols in defining their political stances can we evaluate their roles vis-à-vis liberal democracy. The competing political ideologies of the Mafdal and Shas Parties in Israel and the National Action Party, the Prosperity Party and the Justice and Development Party in Turkey are foci of this analysis. Two controversial concepts, ‘redemption’ in Israel and ‘secularism’ in Turkey, are used to question how these parties appropriate religious symbols in their policies towards secular public and institutions. The arguments draw on a set of interviews with the religious party leaderships and a content analysis of party ideologues' views. The findings suggest that parties that adopt the strategy of sacralization (that is, assigning religious meanings to secular ideas thereby treating them as sacred) appear more moderate yet they are more likely to support authoritarian policies. However, the so-called radical religious parties tend to be more inclusive and are more likely to secularize their respective religious tradition internally by redefining secular terms. Despite their novel political agendas both groups fail to exhibit principled commitment to liberal values and fail to provide inclusive and coherent alternatives to their secularist counterparts.     

Muslims' support for European integration: the role of organizational capacities

What explains Islamic organizations' differing support for European integration and the democratic reforms that it entails? The question is highly relevant in the context of European Union (EU) enlargement towards Muslim-majority countries in the Balkans as well as theoretical debates on reasons and forms of Islamic moderation. Yet, almost no comparative research has been done on Balkan Muslims' support for European integration with the exception of the Turkish case. This article explores the role of interest- and belief-related factors in explaining Muslim organizations' differential support for the EU accession project in Albania and Turkey. The comparison of the most powerful Muslim organizations in both countries enables a most similar cases research design – our cases are similar in all aspects of the identified theoretical framework except for organizational capacities, which we argue explain the difference of attitudes towards the EU.     

Who are the targets of familial electoral coercion? Evidence from Turkey

The unfettered expression of electoral choice is an important democratic right; however, in many contexts voters are pressured by others to cast their votes in certain ways. Electoral coercion is a topic that has received increased attention from researchers in recent years as part of the wave of research on electoral violence, yet there is little consensus in the literature as to who the targets of coercion are most likely to be. This article uses a list experiment embedded in a survey fielded following the Turkish general election of 2018 to identify the targets of coercive electoral practices within families and among close friends. The analysis reveals familial electoral coercion to be strongly conditioned by partisanship and disadvantaged demographic characteristics, but finds no evidence that women are more likely than men to be coerced.     

Probation system in Turkey: an analysis of a public policy formation using multiple streams framework

Turkey initiated a major reform in its criminal justice system in 2005 and a probation system was officially created. This article analyses the probation policy formation, and development processes in Turkey using a multiple streams framework (MSF), as theorised by John Kingdon. Qualitative method is employed through archival records, governmental documents, and semi-structured interviews with key actors. Findings suggest that MSF explains the evolution of the probation system, which emerged in a critical time. However, although the probation system was set up to overcome the increasing prison population and alternative to incarceration, the number of prisoners and probationers have increased significantly. Today, Turkey has been ranked one of the largest prison population in the world. It is concluded that the penal policy has led to unintended consequences, and the penal system including probation practices has been dramatically politicised by the government.     

Patterns of ‘Othering’ in Turkey: A Study of Ethnic,Ideological, and Sectarian Polarisation

This study explores who Turkish citizens view as the Other, their perceptions, evaluations, and the degree of Othering of these groups in the private and public spheres. Drawing from varied political science and social psychology literature, it also examines the role of social contact, perceived threat, and the strength of national and religious identification in predicting levels of Othering. Using a national representative sample, the findings reveal that Kurds are the most Othered group in the private sphere, while both Kurds and AKP (Adalet ve Kalk?nma Partisi – Justice and Development Party) supporters are the most Othered groups in the public sphere. Regardless of who the Other is, lower social contact and higher levels of perceived threat are associated with higher levels of Othering of Kurds, Alevis, AKP supporters, and AKP opponents in both the private and public spheres.     

Understanding young citizens’ political participation in Turkey: does ‘being young’ matter?

Participation is key to the discussions of democracy and justice. For all citizens, no matter their differences, having the ability to participate is a difficult but required condition for a just and democratic political community. Based on the recent research on citizenship in Turkey, this article aims to explore, first, whether young citizens’ political participation shows a different pattern when compared to the rest of the population and, second, whether being young still determines the outcome when controlled for demographical factors and economic status. We then question whether belonging to different collective identities plays a different role in the way young citizens participate, and how. Last, mostly focusing on young citizens’ perceptions of the Gezi Park protests, the paper will discuss the role of politicized collective identities in the formation of conventional and unconventional political participation.     

Youth welfare policy in Turkey in comparative perspective: a case of ‘Denied Youth Citizenship’

This article explores the main characteristics of social and economic policies for young people in Turkey. Inspired by Tom Chevalier’s typology of youth welfare citizenship designed for Western European countries, the article situates Turkey’s youth welfare citizenship model within a comparative perspective and contributes to the extension of Chevalier’s typology to a non-Western European country context. Relying upon the systematic analysis of findings of a nationwide survey on young people that was conducted in 2013, comparative youth statistics, official youth statistics, public expenditures data and existing policy frameworks, the article suggests that Turkey fits well with the denied youth citizenship type in Chevalier’s typology. Two conclusions are drawn with respect to Turkey’s youth welfare citizenship model. First, with respect to the social citizenship dimension, the article finds that social and youth policy structure in Turkey has a familialization effect on young people’s access to income. In terms of economic citizenship, the article suggests that Turkey implements a selective strategy that results in unequal distribution of labour market skills among young people.     

Youth and active citizenship in Turkey: engagement,participation and emancipation

This article critically discusses the establishment of active citizenship in Turkey with a specific focus on young people. In particular, we concentrate on the emergence of different strategies regarding civic and political participation in Turkey, by looking at their relationship with civic and political engagement. The scope is to focus on the influence that various factors have in determining patterns of participation. The research and relative results are based on the narratives inherent to two opposite scenarios – that we defined constraints to engagement and participation and patterns of emancipation – that emerged during the interviews with youth activists of NGOs in Turkey.     

The Effect of Personal Idealism,Relativism, and Machiavellianism on Voting Tendency: A Turkish Study

This study examined the relationship between Turkish voters’ ethical characteristics and voting tendencies to the political left, right, or center by applying the Ethics Position Questionnaire (EPQ) and Mach IV to the collection of data for analysis from 500 voters in a national election in Turkey. The most significant finding is that there was no statistically meaningful relationship among levels of idealism, relativism, or Machiavellianism and voting tendencies to the political left, right, and center. However, results generated by EPQ and Mach IV questionnaire found that voting tendencies were affected by personal relativism (0.10), followed by Machiavellianism (?0.03) and idealism (?0.03). Results show that respondents’ voting tendency was most affected by the level of their personal relativism, but the magnitude of the effect was not statistically significant. The mean scores for Machiavellianism and relativism attributes were on average in the mid-range of the scale, while mean scores for idealism show that the participating voters agreed most strongly with the statements relating to the idealism and could be characterized as absolutist by their low relativism and high idealism. The results demonstrate a positive linear relationship, linking both idealism and relativism to Machiavellianism and indicate statistically significant positive correlations among the three variables.