Up: democratization-autocratization
Akçay, Ümit. 2021. “Authoritarian Consolidation Dynamics in Turkey.” Contemporary Politics 27(1): 79–104. doi:10.1080/13569775.2020.1845920.
- This makes the Turkish case particularly puzzling from a comparative perspective because, unlike in Poland, Hungary, or India for example, the same political party held power both before and after the ‘authoritarian turn’.
- Levitsky and Way (2010, p. 5) describe the ‘competitive authoritarianism’ as a political regime in which ‘formal democratic institutions exist and are widely used as the primary means of gaining power, but in which incumbents’ abuse of the state places them at a significant advantage vis-a-vis their opponents’. According to their definition, there is still room for the opposition but the competition between the incumbent adn the opposition is essentially unfair.
- Akça (2014) (…) argues that the ‘civilianization’ process that was initiated by the AKP through using the EU membership requirements as a leverage agains the old Kemalist establishment between 2002 and 2007, which was initially celebrated as a democratization, actually was part of the AKP’s strategy for conquering the state.
- Adaman and Akbulut (2020, p.3) argue that the AKP rule has carried an element of authoritarianism all along, the intensity of which continues to increase exponentially.
Accumulation regime, mode of regulation, and structural crisis
Basic insights of the Regulation School:
- The realization that capitalist social relations of production and reproduction are inherently unstable and destined for crises. Therefore, regulation is the key component for producing and reproducing capitalist social relations. Broadly, regulation refers to political, economic, institutional, legal, and societal mechanisms that counter crises of capitalist accumulation. Thus, RS rejects the idea of self-regulating and self-stabilizing markets, and assumes that a market society requires state involvement to survive (Boyer, 1990)
- According to Boyer (1987, p.9) … a regime of accumulation is defined by the whole set of regularities which allow a general and more or less consistent evaluation for capital formation, i.e. which dampen and spread over time the imbalances which permanently arise from the process itself.