Assessing centralization: on Turkey’s rising personalist regime

Abstract

Research on non-democratic regimes has accelerated in the post-Cold War world, but inordinate attention paid to procedural definitions of regime type and democratization has reduced the study of utilitarian components in assessing cases of political transition. We utilize two frameworks oft-cited within the comparative authoritarianism literature to evaluate our claim that Turkey has moved from a dominant-party system to one resembling a personalist regime while arguing that elite defection and institutional degradation may catalyse political centralization. In doing so, we refocus evaluative attention on the substantive content of the regime rather than mere modes of perpetuation while reasserting the value of the literature’s diagnostic frameworks to empirically place Turkey’s subtype of authoritarianism.