Democratic Backsliding in Turkey: Clientelism and Executive Aggrandisement under the AKP

Following the ascension to power of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in 2002, it appeared like Turkey was a ‘least likely’ case for democratic backsliding. A range of policies were pursued that were welcomed by Western countries as evidence of the final consolidation of Turkish democracy. These included reining in the influence of the military and judiciary to arbitrarily intervene in political life and pursuing more liberal policies towards the Kurdish population. Yet with hindsight, and after 14 years of AKP rule (12 of them under the premiership of Recep Tayyip Erdogan), such policies now look like the beginnings of democratic backsliding. Turkey has seen an intermeshing of the state and the AKP, a weakening of the independent base of political institutions, an increase in media censorship, and the resumption of confrontational policies with Kurdish communities and the PKK. Turkey is a crucial case that can offer privileged insights into the concept of democratic backsliding (the state-led debilitation or elimination of the political institutions sustaining an existing democracy) by enabling the study of the two key understudied aspects of the concept: (1) what democratic backsliding entails, especially in the context of a weakly democratic hybrid democracy, and (2) what incentives encourage elites to engage in practices that lead to democratic backsliding. This paper argues that backsliding in this context is best understood as the outcome of rational actions undertaken by a small coterie of elites to limit the autonomy of non-executive institutions in order to consolidate the personalisation of power in an individual ruler – what Bermeo calls ‘executive aggrandisement’. It does not entail the outright erosion of democracy in a way that would trouble the international community and many changes were technical in nature and of low popular salience so as to not encourage popular dissension at home. Given that clientelism and patronage were central to enabling the AKP to come to power in the first place, this created a strong incentive for the party to create a system that institutionalised their patronage network. Drawing on the literature on leadership, especially the concept of heresthetics (Riker, 1986), it is argued that Erdogan engaged in the manipulation of politics to boost his ability to engage in patronage and increase the reliance of his political supporters upon his continued premiership. The result was to bolster the personalisation of power in the executive and to hallow out any institutions that could potentially threaten this. It is in the light that the AKP’s current efforts to switch from a parliamentary to a presidential system are best understood.