Post-2016 Turkey: if the Taxonomic Puzzle on the Notion of Competitive Authoritarianism Might Open the Door to a Semantic Constitution Type’s Debate

In the aftermath of two major breakthroughs, the failed coup attempt of July 2016 and the deeply contentious Constitutional referendum of April 2017, the Turkish polity has fallen into a severe state of turmoil. Individual rights, fundamental freedoms, and a wide range of democratic benchmarks registered a dramatic decline. In this precarious state of the art, a burgeoning corpus of academic literature has emerged with the scope of shedding light upon Turkey’s institutional transition. An impressive number of scholars, mainly political scientists, while employing a prevailing taxonomical attitude have been engaged in a passionate debate over the real nature of the novel Turkey’s political regime, ranking it inside (Ersen & Gumuscu 2016; Özbudun 2015) or outside (Tuğal 2016; Çalışkan 2018) the umbrella of competitive authoritarianism (Levitsky and Way 2002). At the same time, a thorough academic discussion that seeks, instead, to classify the renewed constitutional text appears to be lacking in the contemporary literature. With the scope of filling this research gap, this paper intends to examine to what extent the recourse to the Semantic Constitution type, where the power process is frozen in the interests of those who actually hold power (Loewenstein 1969), might successfully explain the reformed Constitution of Turkey. And if this would be the case, what kind of consequences, of theoretical and practical significance, the constitutional text might be called upon to deal with. After all, and as the booming in taxonomical literature suggests, a Constitution which tends to concentrate the powers in the hands of the President at the expense of the other constitutional actors should encourage a scholar debate, this time carried out through a different lens than the previous.