Why One Man Can Ruin Turkey’s Economy

 Why One Man Can Ruin Turkey’s Economy

Did Erdogan break Turkish politics by empowering the presidency—or was it broken already?

By Steven A. Cook, a columnist at Foreign Policy and the Eni Enrico Mattei senior fellow for Middle East and Africa studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan arrives at at Cologne's airport, on September 29, 2018 in Cologne, where he is to inaugurate the Central Mosque, one of Europe's largest.

With the waves of democratization in Latin America and Eastern Europe in the 1980s and 1990s, social scientists could put to the test a long-running debate in political science: which system is superior in sustaining democracies, presidential or parliamentary? Beginning in 1985, a Yale University professor named Juan Linz argued that parliamentarism was better. Academic debates ensued, and subsequent research indicated that the case for parliamentarism is not as categorical as Linz suggested. Important factors such as location, culture, economic development, and history contribute to the relative success of parliamentary systems. The same research highlighted areas where presidential systems performed better.

I bring this up not because I am wistful for graduate school seminars (though I am sometimes) but because Turkish politicians are currently debating “institutional design.” With recent polls showing declines in the popularity of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, opposition leaders promise that if Turkish voters elect a new president in 2023, they will return the country to the parliamentarism that existed before 2017—really a hybrid parliamentary-presidential system. For their part, Erdogan and his party want to maintain the status quo, arguing that presidentialism is a better choice for Turkey.

Who is correct? Neither. Not because Turkey is ungovernable, but because neither system has sustained democracy and neither has been particularly successful in producing good governance.

(Bu yorumun devamı abonelere mahsus .)

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