Something of a Black Box prior to Agenda-setting Formation. Ideas Access, Issue Framing and Problem Definition in the making of Turkey's new Constitution

Nowadays Turkey is facing a process of public consultations aimed at reforming the current Constitution dated 1982 that came into force after the Military Coup of 1980. The constitutional reform is a major project that aims to address the power imbalance between State and government. For the purpose of analysing the extent to which the Constitutional issue is become a crucial feature of democratization, our interest conveys on how the time of the idea of making Turkey's new Constitution “has come”. This contribution's content is the pre-decisional process during which this issue has moved up and down in the Turkish political agenda. We will thus examine the switch from the “condition” to the “problem” military Constitution, being conscious that in the last two decades, different actors have framed the relation “Constitution-democracy” challenging the core and the structure of the post 1980 political system. Within the pre-decisional process, it is possible to sort out two landmarks: the first one in which the idea of constitutional reform has become “acceptable” and the second one, often defined policy access, in which the item is set in the agenda. The main questions behind this research is as follows: to what extent has the problem definition and issue framing influenced the setting of the constitutional reform in Turkish agenda? Considering the switch from “condition” to “problem”, what we can infer from the ideational and the institutional approach of policy access? We will thus present a full-scale study of the framing ideational process involving what happens in the pre-decisional agenda setting “black box”.