Institutionalizing the Exception: Crisis Governance and Accelerated Lawmaking in Turkey

Do economic and political crises fundamentally alter legislative output, or do they instead serve as catalysts for durable institutional change? Conventional accounts suggest that crises trigger temporary surges in emergency legislation, implying that exceptional procedures are short-lived. This paper challenges that assumption by demonstrating that, in Turkey, the distinction between crisis and non-crisis periods is statistically negligible regarding the volume of exceptional legislation. Instead, crises operate as recurring "opportunity structures" through which political actors recalibrate formal rules and informal practices, gradually normalizing exceptional lawmaking within ordinary governance. The study begins with a quantitative analysis of the Turkish Grand National Assembly (TBMM) between 1991 and 2015, utilizing an original dataset of 1,180 ordinary laws, 178 decree-laws, and 248 omnibus/expedited laws. By accounting for word counts and procedural pathways, the analysis reveals a striking continuity: for instance, between 1991 and 2002, an exceptional law was adopted every 14.8 days during crises compared to every 15.4 days in non-crisis periods. Crisis episodes do not necessarily increase output volume; instead, they coincide with shifts in the justification, framing, and institutional drifting of procedural tools. The second part of the paper employs process-tracing from 1971 to 2015 to explain this pattern. It examines how recurrent episodes of severe economic and political crises reshaped parliamentary conventions, lawmaking procedures, and the normalization of omnibus legislation for bundling non germane provisions into "must-pass" bills. Drawing on parliamentary minutes, Constitutional Court decisions, and international reports, the analysis shows how international conditionalities (IMF/World Bank) created compressed timelines that domestic actors strategically mobilized to institutionalize accelerated procedures. These crisis-driven adjustments not only exploited weaknesses in veto players but also contributed to their fragmentation and strengthened the majoritarian ways of lawmaking. Because Turkey has experienced systemic crises with unusual frequency over a long period, it serves as an informative case for understanding how repeated crisis governance may normalize exceptional legislative procedures in other parliamentary systems increasingly exposed to overlapping disruptions. After 2005, the resulting institutional and conventional designs were increasingly deployed under strong parliamentary majorities, with exceptional procedures eventually accounting for over 80 per cent of legislation measured by word count. The paper concludes that crises leave a durable procedural residue that reshapes legislative governance. Findings highlight continuities in exceptional lawmaking across both relatively pluralist and more centralized phases of governance, demonstrating that the lack of effective veto players allows for the sustained exploitation of institutional designs forged during moments of crisis.