Monthly Archives: February 2014

Dear Editors – OR – Turkey and some unhelpful shades of puffery

As a regular reader of op-eds and other articles on Turkey, it’s recently come to my attention how unhelpful many opinion articles are for the purpose of understanding what’s really going on in the country.

There’s plenty of good journalists writing about Turkey, so my point here is not about Turkey coverage in the media overall (which would require at least one post of its own), but about the op-eds, the commentators. I think it’s great that so many articles are being written about Turkey, as there’s so much in the country’s experience that can teach outsiders (especially us poleconomists and polisciers) how political conflict and institutions interact.

The problem (and I think it’s a problem) is not necessarily that editors at mainstream outlets such as the Financial Times or Project Syndicate include partisan articles – either clearly pro-AKP or clearly pro-Gulen (and I’m referring to AKP here as a post-Dec-17 party) – at the expense of articles that provide opinion without feeling like you’re reading something from Pravda. No, the problem is that they’re bad articles, even as the partisan puffed-up ones they appear to be.

Interestingly, just as the AKP and the Gülen movement are entirely different organizations, their puff pieces also exhibit very different kinds of authors. Whereas the former kind is much likely be authored by an actual member of the AKP (or rather, a PR firm ghost-writing it for them) the latter is more likely to be authored by someone who is not formally (if there is such a thing) a member.

As examples of pro-AKP puff pieces, prime examples are: Continue reading →

My Inner Skeptic and Cynic on Recent US commentary on Turkey

The US foreign policy community has been making quite a few waves on Turkey lately. Barely a month ago, two former US ambassadors to Turkey wrote a scathing op-ed in Washington Post criticizing Erdogan and the AKP in its civil war with former allies in the Gulen movement. Yesterday, a who’s-who of the US foreign policy community wrote an open letter to Barack Obama claiming Erdogan is “subverting Turkey’s political institutions and values and endangering the U.S.-Turkey relationship.”

It’s certainly a good thing that influential policy leaders are aware of the real risk that Turkey’s fragile democracy could erode into an authoritarian one-party state. But the Skeptic in me feels these interventions lack a crucial component. Dani Rodrik voiced this in what I think is probably the best paragraph I read on Turkey this week:

We cannot look at all this and focus only on what Erdogan is doing without at least acknowledging that the Gulenists also bear considerable responsibility for bringing the country to its current crisis. The idea that there was something like the rule of law or Turkey was democratizing before Erdogan began to tighten the screws on the Gulen movement is dangerous nonsense. Those who call on Erdogan to respect democracy and the rule of law should be calling on the Gulen movement to do the same. Otherwise, they end up taking sides in a war in which neither side looks pretty.

It’s hard to keep a straight face reading some of the above linked interventions. One wonders where these concern were during the height of the Ergenekon, Sledgehammer trials, and KCK trials, which are only the most recent of Turkey’s long list of tainted political trials. I don’t remember seeing any concerns voiced after the Roboski massacre, when fighter jets bombed 40 (mostly-teenager) Kurdish villagers crossing the Iraq.

In regards to this, my inner Cynic is quite informative. In addition to noting that Kurdish villagers do not give a lot of political donations to US politicians, moreover the the apparent shift in many US policymakers’ views on Turkey may not be about its quality of democracy at all (perhaps it should, though).

Instead, as Michael Koplow explains in a recent Foreign Affairs article, the US has been getting increasingly annoyed with Turkey’s government for a host of other (not necessarily related to the quality of democracy) events. You should read the whole article but among a few key points that likely underlie the likely end of the US-Turkey “model relationship” are: Continue reading →

Here’s to Tunisia’s new constitution, let’s hope it matters

Tunisia has a new constitution, and it’s relatively liberal. It’s a much-needed sign of progress in a region that hasn’t seen much of it lately, and we’re all naturally very excited.

Some of us are perhaps more excited than others. Here’s Mustafa Akyol in The New York Times:

In 2011, protests led to the ouster of Tunisia’s longtime dictator, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. The spirit of revolution soon spread to other Arab countries, albeit with less-impressive results. Libya suffered from bloody internal turmoil; Egypt reverted to brutal military rule; Syria continues to be ravaged by civil war. In Tunisia, however, the nascent democratic process has not been derailed. The country’s new Constitution — the most liberal and democratic charter the Muslim Middle East has ever seen — remains the Arab Spring’s crowning achievement to date.

Ratified on Jan. 26, the Constitution is a strikingly “We the people” document in a region where “Me the state” has long been the norm. It protects civil liberties, establishes a separation of powers, and guarantees women parity in political bodies. Though it declares Islam the country’s official religion and refers generally to Tunisia’s identity as an Islamic state, the Constitution protects religious freedom for all.

Civil liberties, separation of powers, gender equality, and religious freedom for all… Now, I understand how the author badly wants to swim in this wonderful liberal-democracy-for-all-soup. After all, I can only imagine how disappointing it must be to have expected this to occur in Turkey and instead getting penguins, porn lobbies, and pepper spray.

Also, I’m not completely convinced by describing Tunisia’s constitutions as “the most liberal and democratic charter the Muslim Middle East has ever seen”. I’d like to see a real comparison between Turkey’s 1960 constitution and this one… Continue reading →

Radical Political Islam and the Empowerment of the Poor and Pious

I have a paper coming out in Econometrica this month (ungated version here) on how local Islamist mayors increased female participation in education in Turkey during the 1990s. The main contribution of the article is that it uses a method called the Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) which allows identifying an estimate of the causal effect of having Islamist political control.

A focus on causality is important as the reason why Islamist-controlled constituencies have poor women’s rights may come from voter-specific characteristics, like preferences for political Islam, as much as the effect of the Islamist politician itself. If politicians have little power to influence policy other than adopting the policy position of a representative (often the median) voter, then (Islamic) party identity doesn’t matter for policy, only voter preferences do. Resulting policies may be detrimental to development, but is then the result of voter preferences, not politicians. If for some reason, elected politicians can influence policy away from the representative voter to their own preferred position, then politician identity will matter for policy. In this case, unwanted policies may be as much the fault of the politician (see this paper for more through discussion). Continue reading →

Remembering Gezi

I meet “Zeki” in a bar in central Beyoğlu. He’s around thirty. His eyes and face are all red, and when he speaks he sounds like one of those in-movie mob bosses on life support. He tells me all this is due to his participation in four nights of riots around Taksim Square and in the Beşiktaş quarters, his visible medical symptoms the consequences of breathing in and just being around pepper- and tear gas. Despite this, he tells me, he only needed to visit the hospital once, which happened to be the night before I ran into him.

During a tense clash with the police in Beşiktaş the night before, a female friend of his faints, as much out of exhaustion as the tear gas. Without thinking, Zeki picks her up and starts to walk away from the police and the fighting. At that point, he his by a plastic bullet in his rear end. The reason for this brief hospitalization is thus “plastic bullet in the butt.” It could be worse, of course, but at that moment in the bar, it couldn’t be more funny.

After we stop laughing at this, he tells me more about himself. Zekis has an M.A. from UC San Diego, an uncle in Reykjavik, and works as a stock broker in Istanbul’s financial district. In the last election, he voted for Erdoğan and the AK party. He’s thus not your average protester. And Gezi isn’t your average protests.

This is from my notes, written while visiting Istanbul during the Gezi protests last summer. The reason why I was looking through them again was this week’s start of the court case against the police officers allegedly behind the death of Ali Ismail Korkmaz. Seeing the picture of Ali Ismail’s mother sitting with his picture in her lap, it hit me that it’s been more than half a year since the Gezi protests shook Turkey. Since then any illusion of political instability in one of the US (and Sweden’s) key allies in the region has been shattered. Continue reading →