How Do Populist Governments Legitimize Their Court-Curbing Policies? Evidence from Turkey

In the past few decades, we witnessed how democracies erode at the hands of elected leaders who weaken democratic institutions such as the judiciary from the inside out. Although in the literature there are different explanations about why and how the governments erode the power and independence of the judiciary, we do not know much about how they legitimize these actions in the eyes of the public and whether their legitimization rhetoric changes across time and different types of court-curbing practices. Focusing on the three ruling periods of the Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) (2002-2007; 2007-2014; 2014-2017), this paper aims to explain whether and if so how, a populist government’s legitimization for its court-curbing practices change as the government consolidates its power. To analyse the AKP’s legitimization discourses for the formal court-curbing practices we look at the parliamentary debates regarding the judicial reforms proposed between 2002 and 2017. We find that while at the early years of the AKP government, democratization, EU membership, and increasing judicial efficiency were the dominant justifications for the judicial reforms, as the AKP consolidated power, populist-centered justifications such as blaming the preceding governments, appealing to security concerns and interests of the public appear as the dominant discourses.