Saying ‘Turkey poses a challenge for democratization literature’ would be an understatement. Despite its long experience with competitive, multi-party elections, democratic progress is stuck in the Partly Free Freedom House category for decades.
In the 1980s and 1990s Turkey was struggling with military tutelage, political instability, ethnic conflict and macroeconomic chaos, but the last decade witnessed progress. To fully gauge its scale and scope it’s useful to look at some of Turkey’s ‘peers’.
Unlike most single-case studies of democratic progress in Turkey, this paper tackles the arrested democratic consolidation problem from a comparative and historical-institutional perspective. Without grasping long-term institutional trends, it is difficult to contextualize the unexpected chain of events & elections in Turkish politics in 2014. Secondly, ‘we gain knowledge through reference.’ (Dogan & Pelassy, 1990) Mexico, Brazil & Argentina will be utilized as benchmarks to gauge the past performance and future prospects of democratic consolidation in Turkey.
