Has Turkey become a European-style welfare state? Even welfare state specialists would have a hard time in answering this question, given that the Turkish welfare state has remained virtually invisible in the comparative literature. In fact, however, Turkey has come to establish virtually all policies that make up the welfare state. And, these programs have been ever expanding over the past decades. They have been doing so despite a host of powerful pressures, such as globalization, economic crises, and one structural adjustment program after another. In spite of all these odds, and yet resembling experiences in the Global South, the Turkish welfare state appears to have been ever-expanding. In this paper, we trace the development of the Turkish welfare state from 1980 until today. We aim to answer three sets of questions concerning the direction and nature of change in Turkey’s welfare state: How has government’s commitment in the form of ‘welfare effort’ evolved? Do trends in social rights corroborate those findings? In the meantime, has the welfare state gone through any transformation in terms of its program structure? We answer these questions by using three sets of data: We generate and analyze original social rights data on Turkey based on the Social Citizenship Indicator Program (SCIP), Comparative Welfare Entitlements Dataset (CWED) and Social Assistance and Minimum Income Protection Interim Dataset (SAMIP). To summarize vast amount of data in a comprehensible manner, we also compute Decommodification Index and Benefit Generosity Index scores based on these datasets. We then analyze social expenditures based on newly published data from the OECD’s Social Expenditure Database. We complement both sets of quantitative data with qualitative insights we gained from in-depth case research on Turkey. Based on these data, we conduct a comprehensive tour d’horizon to trace the transformation of Turkey’s social security system over the last decades. We arrive at three sets of findings. First, social expenditures show a secular trend of expansion over the last three decades. Expenditures continued to grow despite significant structural change and recurrent economic crises. Second, these expansions are mirrored in the overall expansion of social rights through increasing coverage and new programs. Based on these findings, we argue that similar to other ‘welfare laggards’, Turkey’s welfare state has been ‘catching up’ with European welfare states. Finally, this expansion has resulted in a limited transformation of the programmatic structure of the Turkish welfare state. Especially since around the early 2000s, the programmatic structure seems to have solidified around a ‘pension-heavy’ welfare state, even pension-heavier than welfare states in Turkey’s Southern European neighbors.
