Policy Analysis in Turkey

Caner Bakir, Güneş Ertan, Bakir, Caner, Ertan, Güne?, Caner Bakir, Güne? Ertan, Güne? Ertan

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781447347217
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume provides the first comprehensive overview of the state of policy analysis in Turkey for an international audience. Noting Turkey's traditionally strong, highly centralised state, the book documents the evolution of policy analysis in the country, providing an in-depth review of the context, constraints, and dominant modes of policy analysis performed by both state and non-state actors.

The book examines the role of committees, experts, international actors, bureaucrats as well as public opinion in shaping policy analysis in the country through their varying ideas, interests and resources. In doing so, it presents the complex decision-making mechanisms that vary significantly among policy-making actors and institutions, documenting the key, yet unexamined, aspects of policy analysis in Turkey.

It will be a valuable resource for those studying policy analysis within Turkey and as a comparison with other volumes in the International Library of Policy Analysis Series.

Part One

Historical roots, styles and methods of policy analysis in Turkey

TWO

The past, present and future of policy analysis in Turkey

Akif Argun Akdoğan, Göktuğ Morçöl, Gökhan Orhan and Mete Yıldız

Historical and global context of policy analysis in Turkey

In this chapter we trace the evolution of policy analysis in Turkey. The roots of policy analytical practices and thinking in today's Turkey can be traced back to the administrative traditions of the Ottoman Empire, when there were some practices that would fit the most general definition of policy analysis: giving advice to rulers or policy-makers for decision-making. There were efforts by Ottoman intellectuals to adopt the European scientific knowledge and practices to produce policy-relevant knowledge in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The European and American influences continued in the Republican era, as the leaders made more systematic efforts to apply scientific knowledge and methods in policy-making. The knowledge transfer from Europe and the US was accelerated in the 1990s by Turkish academics who gained their advanced educational degrees abroad. They then began to teach courses on policy analysis at universities, organising public policy conferences in this and following decades.

Harold Lasswell, in his conceptualisation of the 'policy sciences of democracy' (Lasswell, 1951, 1971), most cogently articulated the body of knowledge the Turkish academics transferred. As Dunn (2012) points out, Lasswell's articulation followed centuries of developments in giving advice to the rulers of human societies. These rulers sought advice from 'symbol specialists' (that is, shamans, the clergy and the educated) before making decisions about when to plant crops, when to go to war against a rival tribe, and so on. These forms of advice were based on mysticism – they were not 'scientific' in the sense we would use the term today. Later in human history, the practice of advice giving was codified in major texts such as the Code of Hammurabi and Confucius and Kautilya's treatises, in Mesopotamia, China and India respectively. Centuries after these developments – with the Enlightenment thinking in the late 17th and early 18th centuries and the developments in scientific methods in the 19th and early 20th centuries – systematic and empirical information collection and analysis became possible, which constituted the foundations of Lasswell's articulation of the policy sciences.

The backdrop of the period of Enlightenment and the development of scientific methods led to a series of social and economic transformations in Europe and the US. The Industrial Revolution created the conditions for massive migrations to cities and the ensuing social problems, such as sharpening social class divisions and increasing poverty and health epidemics in cities. The new means of transportation and communication (rail systems and nationwide postal services), combined with advances in data collection methods (for example, surveys) and quantitative analytical methods enabled European and US governments to conduct nationwide population censuses and surveys on such social problems – the first systematic and nationwide censuses in the US were carried out in 1790 and in England in 1801 (Dunn, 2012, p 35). The surveys of social problems that were conducted by the Manchester and London Statistical Societies in England were enabled by innovations in data collection and quantitative analytical methods (Dunn, 2012, p 36). Consequently, some European countries such as England managed to alleviate the problems of poverty, crime and contagious diseases by applying quantitative and statistical methods (Porter, 2008, p 240; Yeo, 2008, p 83).

Belief in science and advances in survey methods and quantitative analyses during the Enlightenment culminated in the formulation of positivism by Auguste Comte in the 19th century. Logical positivist philosophers (Vienna Circle of Logical Empiricism), such as Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath and Moritz Schlick, codified positivism in the early 20th century. Parallel to this development, the US federal government made significant efforts to collect and analyse information about social conditions, and employed social scientists to generate policy-relevant knowledge. These efforts intensified after the First World War, particularly during the Great Depression, as the social and economic problems and conflicts became more acute, and the American people turned increasingly to federal government in search of solutions for their problems.

Lasswell's formulation of the 'policy sciences of democracy' was an attempt to articulate a conceptual framework for the developments in the early 20th century. His formulation reflected a key concern of his and many other political scientists of his time: what should be the role of expert knowledge in policy-making in a democratic society? Lasswell (1971, p 15) wrote: 'policy sciences of democracy … is directed toward knowledge needed to improve the practice of democracy', whose ultimate goal would be a 'fuller realization of human dignity' (1951, p 5). With his formulation, Lasswell created a conceptual problem and potential dilemma that has kept many theorists of policy analysis busy to this day. In essence he posited that policy sciences would have two potentially conflicting aims: that of generating objective knowledge through empirical scientific thinking and methods, on the one hand, and that of 'improving democracy' and 'realisation of human dignity', which is necessarily value-laden. Farr, Hacker and Kazee (2006, p 585) argue that the inner contradiction in Lasswell's formulation has continued to confound academics and practitioners. They ask, are political scientists (or policy analysts) obligated to serve democratic values? And what are those values anyway?

There are two implicit assumptions in Lasswell's conceptualisation that affected the practice and thinking in policy analysis in the following decades: humans are capable of making rational decisions and the government is capable of solving social problems. Without rational thinking, no science would be possible. Lasswell's policy scientists have to be rational, by definition. 'The government' is a unified actor that can act rationally. This conceptualisation of 'the government' as a unified actor is reflected in major textbooks in the field. Dye (2017, p 1) defines public policy as 'whatever governments choose to do or not to do.' According to Simon (2007, p 1), 'Public policy is … what government ought or ought not do, and does or does not do.'

Lasswellian assumptions of objective knowledge generation through rational thinking and analysis, pursuit of democratic ideals and human dignity and the primary role of the government in solving social problems did not meet major challenges in the 1960s, but were questioned as the practice and theory of policy analysis evolved in the following decades (Radin, 2013). In the 1960s, the federal government in the US expanded, a few federal governmental agencies (for example, the US Department of Defense) formed their units of policy analysis, federal agencies designed and implemented programmes to address social problems such as poverty and policy analytical methods such as cost-benefit analysis and programme budgeting were developed and refined. The practice of policy analysis spread to other countries in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly in the 1990s, as part of the globalisation of the world economy.

Radin (2013) notes that during this geographic expansion, policy analysts began to realise that the 'boundaries' of the systems they studied and the 'targets' of policies and programmes they designed could no longer be defined clearly. The boundaries between 'domestic' and 'international' issues and between the 'private' and 'public' realms were blurred. In the 1990s, as the policy think tanks proliferated, the federal government's policy analysis units lost their near monopoly in producing policy-relevant information.

The blurring of boundaries and the loss of federal government's monopoly over policy analysis challenged the notion that policy advice was supposed to be objective and based on rational analyses. It became more difficult to differentiate between 'objective analysis' and 'value-laden politics'. Radin (2013) observes that the world of policy analysis has become even more complex in the early 21st century, as public policies are made and implemented in networks of governmental and non-governmental actors.

The developments in the environment and practice of policy analysis in the 1990s and 2000s instigated theoretical challenges to the Lasswellian vision of policy sciences. The first line of challenges was directed at the assumptions of rationality and scientificity in policy analysis. Critical theorist Mark Fischer (1990, 1995, 2009) lauded Lasswell's goals of furthering democracy and realising human dignity, but he criticised the deceptive image of scientificity the 'policy sciences' created. Fischer argued that the practice of policy analysis masked the power relations in societies and helped reproduce the existing inequitable distribution of resources.

Another line of challenges came from rational choice (public choice, polycentrism and institutional rational choice) theorists, who did not critique the rationality assumption, but the role attributed to the government in solving society's problems (see, for example, Ostrom, 1990; Friedman, 1996; Mueller, 1997; McGinnis, 1999). In this theoretical framework, governmental units and agencies are viewed as actors who play roles in policy processes, together with many others. Public choice theorists particularly challenge the view of 'government' as a unified actor that can make cohesive decisions and take actions; instead, they argue, governments are composed of multiple 'self-seeking' actors. Rational choice theorists in general also challenge the notion that 'the government' represents the 'public interest' as opposed to 'private interests', and thus they question the validity of the distinction between the 'public' and 'private' realms.

The developments in Europe and the US since the 17th century affected the evolution of the policy analysis education, research and practice in Turkey. However, those effects were mediated by the country's own history and traditions. Both in the Ottoman and Republican periods, several attempts were made to bring European and US knowledge and practices in policy analysis to the country, but were not adopted easily or fully, sometimes because of the lack of organisational capacity and other times because of the resistance of politicians and bureaucrats. We now turn to this history.

Policy analysis practice in Turkey's history

The Ottoman Empire had its own tradition of policy analysis in the broadest sense of the term: giving advice to rulers. The governmental institutions of the Empire were more advanced in producing polity-relevant knowledge compared to its contemporaries in Europe and the Middle East. During its earlier centuries, the Ottoman government was admired by European thinkers such as Trajano Boccalini (1556–1613) as a living example of the ideal polity of the Renaissance: 'an artificial construction which had been concisely and purposely built up, a State mechanism which was arranged like a clock, and which made use of the various species and strengths and qualities of men as its springs and wheels' (quoted in Gordon, 1991, p 11). This clockwork was based on the principles of merit in recruiting military and civilian bureaucrats. Austrian ambassador Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq declared in 1694: 'Turks esteem no men for their birth, but only for their own performed accomplishments' (quoted in çşrakman, 2001, p 52).

The fortunes of the Ottoman Empire began to turn after the consecutive defeats its armies faced against European forces in the later centuries of its 600-year existence, particularly in the 19th century. The rulers of the Empire then began to implement a series of policy reforms inspired by developments in Europe – the major reason for this was the thinking that the successes of European countries in the battlefields had resulted from advancements in science and scientific methods.

Inspired by European practices, the Ottoman bureaucrats began using scientific data collection methods to compile information about the population of the Empire. A few decades after the censuses conducted in the US and England, a nationwide census was conducted in the Ottoman Empire in 1831. The aim was to determine how many soldiers could be recruited for military service, and to make an inventory of goods belonging to peasants to find out their tax collection potentials. In the late 19th century the bureaucrats of the Empire expanded the scope of their data collection to include information about foreign trade, the general population, agriculture, education and industry. The lack of qualified personnel for data collection, organisational problems in the governmental agencies and technical difficulties limited the accuracy and quality of the data collected; consequently, the data were not used to formulate or evaluate policies (İnalcık and Pamuk, 2000, p iv).

The founders of the Republic of Turkey made more systematic efforts to use data collected using scientific methods in policy-making. They came from ranks of the military and civilian bureaucrats of the Empire, who were well versed in the European and US ideals and the trends of the late 19th and early 20th centuries (Köker, 1992, p 114). An example of the influence of these trends and one of the early signs that the Modern Turkish Republic was determined to use scientific methods of policy analysis in making policies was Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's invitation to US pragmatist philosopher John Dewey¹ to Turkey in 1924. Dewey proposed that the educational system in Turkey should be based on problem-solving and scientific thinking (Ata, 2000, p 127).

The US influence on Turkish public administration and policy-making gained pace in the 1950s, with the ascension of the pro-US Democrat Party to power. In this decade, a series of US experts who were invited to Turkey drafted reports about the reorganisation of Turkish public administration (for example the Dorr (Hilts) Report, the Neumark Report, the Barker Report, and the Thornburg Report, as cited in Yayman, 2008) and how to use modern policy analytical techniques (Sözen, 2003, p 203).

More serious and systematic efforts in adopting and applying policy analytical methods were made in the 1960s. The State Planning Organisation (SPO) was established in 1960, with the help of Dutch economist Jan Tinbergen (1903–94). SPO prepared the consecutive five-year development plans in this and in following decades. Governmental institutions were required to use policy instruments such as input-output analysis and cost-benefit analysis in preparations of their investment proposals. SPO reviewed these proposals for their compatibility with five-year plans and it had the authority to reject them on technical/analytical grounds (Sezen, 1999, p 221). This was too much power granted to a technical organisation, the Parliament and government thought later; consequently, the powers of SPO were diminished with amendments in its enabling law in the 1970s. The experience of SPO illustrates that attempts to use analytical methods in the formulation and evaluation of public policies in Turkey were frustrated by some politicians who did not want to yield some of their policy-making powers to technocrats and the sections of bureaucracy that held on to their legalistic traditions.

After the military coup in 1980, another series of efforts was made by political leaders to apply policy analytical methods in policy-making. These efforts were also demanded by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and The World Bank, from which the Turkish government had requested financial and technica...

Table of contents

• Coverpage
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables and figures
• Notes on contributors
• one: Pushing the pendulum from politics to policy: the state of policy analysis in Turkey
• Part One: Historical roots, styles and methods of policy analysis in Turkey
• Part Two: Policy analysis by governments
• Part Three: Experts, international actors and public opinion
• Part Four: Parties and civil society-based policy analysis
• Part Five: Academic, bureaucratic and advocacy-based policy analysis