Talking 'Democracy' Moving into 'Autocracy': Securitization of 'Democracy' in Turkey

According to the World Values Survey, Turkish citizens value democracy as much as the citizens in Western democracies; however the majority of Turkish people vote for a political party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi - AKP), which, especially since 2011 progressively drifted the country into an authoritarian path. The paper is an attempt to solve this conundrum. It makes two specific claims. First, the conceptions of 'democracy' in the Turkish political context represent different features compared with the understandings of liberal democracy in Western Europe, which partially explains the support for politicians with illiberal tendencies. Second, a paradoxical process of the 'securitization of democracy' has led the Turkish President to consolidate its power in a progressive and unconstrained manner through the construction of 'enemies' of Turkish state, while ensuring continued citizens' support for his illiberal rule. More precisely, Turkish government, with strong backing of the majority, has successfully attacked basic constituents of democracy, in particular pluralism, media freedom, the impartiality of the judiciary, the protection of minority rights and fundamental individual rights by declaring these basic pillars of liberal democracy a 'threat' to the state. This new labeling justified extraordinary measures, including undemocratic means for the protection of Turkish state and democracy, in particular the restriction of basic freedoms, press freedom, and complete disregard of the rule of law. Against this backdrop, the paper generates a typology for mapping the changes in the usages of democracy by the Turkish political elite under the AKP rule across time, and links these changes into the discursive construction of 'threats' to Turkish state's survival in a causal pathway. These arguments are proved through (political elite) discourse analysis and process-tracing. The paper provides empirical evidence for grasping the conceptualizations of democracy by the political elite, which, largely remained an understudied topic, and contributes to the burgeoning research on the popular support to illiberal democracies in Europe and beyond.