Presidents and Legislative Parties: A Content Analysis of the Annual Presidential Addresses to the Grand National Assembly, 1923-2013

One particularly important characteristic of constitutions is the relationship between legislature, head of government and head of state. The Turkish Republic is an intriguing case in this respect, because several constitutional reforms have altered this relationship in the course of the country’s history. In recent decades, Turkey has faced particularly interesting constitutional and political developments, especially since its de-facto switch to a semi-presidential system following the 2007 constitutional referendum, which enabled the popular election of the country’s already strong President thus resembling a semi-presidential President. The constitutional referendum in April 2017 transformed Turkey’s system of government completely into a presidential one. These recent developments merit a renewed effort in studying the evolving relationship empirically and place it into the context of the political history of the Turkish Republic. In this paper, we will comparatively examine the Turkish Presidents’ Annual Addresses to the Parliament between 1923 and 2013 focusing, firstly, on the rhetorical style and terminology the Presidents used to address Parliament; what perception of Parliament as an institution is reflected in their speeches; how they addressed (and about) MPs; how they addressed (and referred to) the legislative parties in the Grand National Assembly; and what policy issues and constitutional topics they stressed. Secondly, we will seek to identify the extent to which Presidents had a legislative agenda of their own. In this context, we assume that Presidents both with formal (1924-1961) and more tenuous or informal (1961-2013/2017) party affiliations had policy objectives and sought certain policies to be passed by the legislature. It will be particularly interesting to examine how Presidential policy agendas were presented during the single-party era (1923-1946) and afterwards, 1946-2013. The findings will show that Presidents often strike a balance between their ‘role’ as non-partisan and inclusive figurehead, particularly during the Annual Addresses, and their ambitions as active and strong participants in the policy process, calling for the passage of particular legislation. Empirically, we will draw on the full texts of all Presidential speeches between 1924-2011, compiled and published by the Grand National Assembly of Turkey. For the additional two speeches of the years 2012 and 2013, we use the data available on the official website of the 11th Turkish President. We will use a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods of text analysis. The former, especially structural topic models, the identification of keywords in context and the use of classification techniques will help us to establish general trends, differences between individual Presidents and the evolution of individual Presidents’ speeches over time. We will combine these techniques, which are based on a “bag-of-words approach” with qualitative methods to account for changes in the language and identify sophisticated variations in the type of rhetoric, arguments and strategies for the legitimation of political agendas.