Populists and Global Economic Governance: The Turkish Case and the IMF

Populists challenge global economic institutions in a variety of ways. While the literature almost exclusively focuses on the specific tactics and themes used in this challenge, the political-economic basis of the populist backlash against global institutions is rarely discussed. Regarding the economic underpinnings, the existing work often claims in a broad-brush way that left-wing populism is pro-redistribution while right-wing populism is generally supportive of market-oriented policies. In this paper, we look at a right-wing populist actor, Turkey's AKP (Justice and Development Party), and its interaction with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Using automated text analysis and sentiment analysis, we demonstrate that the IMF’s criticism directly ‘pokes’ at the AKP’s populist political-economic policies sustaining it in power. Particularly, the themes that emerge in the IMF’s criticism such as the widening current account deficit and rising external imbalance, the use of selective tax reliefs and pardons, selective distribution of resources to its supporters instead of a universal social policy, and the use of monetary policy tools to substitute fiscal discipline are the very economic resources the AKP uses for vote-buying and to sustain itself in power. The AKP leadership then resorts to populists tactics that were identified in the literature and counters the Fund’s criticism by arguing that monetary policy difficulties are because of ‘conspiratorial attacks of global forces and power centers’ against the Turkish Lira and claims to defend the ‘national sovereignty’ against international (IMF) elites. We contribute to the literature not only by looking at the political-economic basis of the populist backlash against global economic institutions but also by using an innovative methodological approach combining automated text analysis and sentiment analysis with machine learning.