The policy agenda represents the set of problems facing the society and is a product of strategic choices and preferences of a variety of political actors including elected politicians, political parties, the public, and the media. Societal problems are often complex and require immediate attention. However, human beings and the institutions they inhabit have limited attention spans, as a result of which many of the important policy problems facing the society fail to get onto the political agenda, even if they succeed, they seldom receive enough attention to trigger policy change. In this book, we attempt to explore the agenda dynamics in a system with an additional layer of complication, political instability that arose from weak political institutionalization, ideological fragmentation, and the failure to solidify democratic gains. We test some of the key theories of policy responsiveness and political agenda setting under a variety of different political conditions in Turkey over a period of forty years. Although we primarily seek to contribute to the study of Turkish politics, we believe that our project will also offer valuable insights into the research on agenda-setting and policy responsiveness in countries where political stability is often hampered by non-democratic tendencies and where cooperation among political actors is far from a norm.
Our bookās multifaceted approach to the question of agenda setting under different political conditions makes it of interest to a large audience of scholars, researchers, and students within the field of comparative politics and public policy. Broadly defined, this book makes a number of contributions to our understanding of the dynamics of political agenda setting in electoral democracies as well as competitive authoritarian regimes. First, it offers an attention-based theory of democratic responsiveness with an emphasis on the role of institutions. Second, by focusing on different periods of Turkish political history, it enables comparisons within the same country under different forms of government such as military dictatorship, democratic but short-lived coalition and minority governments, and stable majority governments. In this respect, our book examines a diverse set of questions relating to empirical democratic theory and public policy. Since the book extends the current studies on comparative political agendas to a new region, the Middle East, we believe it will be appealing to the scholars of Middle East politics as well.
Our book also aims to shed light into the electoral success and durability of the governing Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP) in Turkey. Past scholarship focused almost exclusively on the voter side of the equation and sought to explain the determinants of party support and economic voting. In the present project, we take into account a broad range of factors that come into play in shaping Turkish politics in the past decades. By doing so, our book shows that studies which attribute the AKPās success and durability to its successful clientelistic strategies are incomplete.
Agenda Dynamics in Established and Transitional Democracies
During their tenure, governments typically face a large number of problems and issues that compete for space in the political agenda (Carmines and Stimson 1993; Jones and Baumgartner 2005). The issues facing the government simultaneously may be very diverse and handling a diverse set of problems that require immediate attention would necessitate a good level of expertise in policy issues and organizational skills. Given that attention is a scarce resource, governments have to prioritize some issues over others (Jones and Baumgartner 2005).
Prioritization of issues is a complex process. Governments have to respond to their electoral mandates, opposition parties, interest groups, public opinion, and the media (Froio et al. 2017; Jennings et al. 2011). While working through this process, governments have to choose carefully from the menu of issues since systematic under-attention to issues important to the public would likely result in punishment in the ballot box. Therefore, parties are expected to take cues from the voters by prioritizing those issues that the public deems as important and requiring action. Similarly, parties regardless of their governing status, have to keep up with their electoral mandates and carry out their promises to avoid loss in votes.
A strong linkage between public opinion and policymaking activities (opinion-policy linkage) as well as between party programs and subsequent policymaking efforts (program-policy linkage) is considered crucial for a healthy democracy. A voluminous literature has examined these two linkages and found strong associations. However, the bulk of these studies have focused exclusively on advanced democracies with strongly institutionalized party systems and with programmatic parties. The literature on party institutionalization and programmatic parties suggests that parties in such systems target the median voter and compete with each other based on programmatic policy proposals by offering public goods. In weakly institutionalized party systems, on the contrary, clientelistic parties tend to be the norm. Past research on clientelism in weakly institutionalized party systems has shown that parties in these systems target local constituencies and distribute club goods instead of appealing to the general public via public goods. The clientelistic linkage mechanism employed by parties insulates the policymakers from the policy priorities of their constituents since selective material benefits are substituted for collective, policy-based benefits (Epstein 2009), a fact that hampers the connections between the principal and the agent.
It is widely accepted in the literature that programmatic citizen-politician linkage mechanisms and electoral competition based on programmatic policy proposals deliver better results for representation and are more acceptable to electoral constituencies than the clientelistic and charismatic linkage mechanisms (Kitschelt et al. 2010, 29). Similarly, scholars have argued that the combination of at least a moderately stable party system with programmatic alternatives creates the basis for a durable democracy with mass support (Huntington 1968; Linz and Stepan 1996). Clientelistic and personalistic linkage mechanisms, on the other hand, are usually considered to be detrimental to democratic representation. In this regard, studying agenda-setting and policy responsiveness in a non-established democracy with weak party system institutionalization and high levels of clientelism will offer valuable insights into these two literatures.
Past scholarship has also shown that the mass media play a decisive role in policy processes, shaping policy agendas directly or indirectly by minimizing information and decision-making costs (Wolfe et al. 2013; Vliegenthart et al. 2016). However, as Hallin and Mancini (2004) argued, there is considerable variation in media system characteristics across countries. Given the role the mass media play in agenda dynamics, it is surprising that the agenda dynamics outside polities with what Hallin and Mancini call democratic corporatist or liberal models of media and politics, where high degree of autonomy and professionalization, and limited political parallelism in the media are key features, have received little scholarly attention. One might expect to see divergent agenda-setting patterns in countries with media systems influenced heavily by political and state actors, and constrained by state in...