This policy brief examines the timing of Turkey’s authoritarian turn using raw data measuring freedoms from the Freedom House (FH). It shows that Turkey’s authoritarian turn under the ruling AKP is not a recent phenomenon. Instead, the country’s institutional erosion – especially in terms of freedoms of expression and political pluralism – in fact began much earlier, and the losses in the earlier periods so far tend to dwarf those occurring later.
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On the Timing of Turkey’s Authoritarian Turn
1. FREE POLICY
NETWORK BRIEF SERIES
Erik Meyersson
April 2016
On the Timing of Turkey’s
Authoritarian Turn
This policy brief examines the timing of Turkey’s authoritarian turn using
raw data measuring freedoms from the Freedom House (FH). It shows that
Turkey’s authoritarian turn under the ruling AKP is not a recent
phenomenon. Instead, the country’s institutional erosion – especially in
terms of freedoms of expression and political pluralism – in fact began
much earlier, and the losses in the earlier periods so far tend to dwarf those
occurring later.
2. 2On the Timing of Turkey’s Authoritarian Turn
Introduction
A growing field in economics emphasizes the
importance of the media in shaping economic
outcomes. Whereas the role of the media in
informing voters is well established (Strömberg,
2015), recent research also points to the link
between the rise of illiberal democracies (Mukand
and Rodrik, 2016) and authoritarian control over
media (Guriev and Treisman, 2015).
In few countries is the link between
authoritarianism and restrictions on freedom of
expression as pervasive as in Turkey. The Turkish
government under the Erdoğan-led Justice and
Development Party AKP has gutted the judiciary
of most of its independence, and set it loose to
crack down on critical media. These dire
circumstances, however, contrast markedly with
descriptions of Turkey from of a few years ago.
Quite recently many analysts still deemed Turkey
a “vibrant democracy”, and as late as in 2013 the
foreign minister of Sweden proclaimed:
“Erdoğan’s Turkey is on the right path.” This
media shift raises concerns over the public
portrayal of Turkey’s institutional development
up until the last few years as well as the extent to
which analysts may have misinterpreted Turkey’s
institutional development over the past decade.
Measures of Freedoms
To this date, the most prominent source of
measuring freedoms in the world is the Freedom
House's annual Freedom of the World reports
(Freedom House, 2015), which designates
countries into one of three statuses: Free, Partly
Free, and Not Free, in ascending order
in freedoms. In constructing these statuses, FH
uses subscores for 7 subcategories, aggregated into
2 categories -- Political Rights (hereby PR), with a
range of 0 to 40 increasing in freedoms, and Civil
Liberties (hereby CL), with a range 0 to 60
increasing in freedoms – for which each then gets
its own 1-7 (with a low value indicating more
freedoms and vice versa), and in turn these are
used to classify a country as having a particular
Freedom status. From the FH's methodology
section:
A country or territory is awarded 0 to 4 points for each
of 10 political rights indicators and 15 civil liberties
indicators, which take the form of questions; a score of 0
represents the smallest degree of freedom and 4 the
greatest degree of freedom. The political rights
questions are grouped into three subcategories:
Electoral Process (3 questions), Political Pluralism and
Participation (4), and Functioning of Government (3).
The civil liberties questions are grouped into four
subcategories: Freedom of Expression and Belief (4
questions), Associational and Organizational Rights
(3), Rule of Law (4), and Personal Autonomy and
Individual Rights (4).
The PR category thus focuses more on rights
pertaining to politics, and is used also to construct
an indicator variable for whether a country
constitutes an electoral democracy or not. CL, as
the name indicates, is more focused on liberties,
including the right to freedom of expression,
including media freedoms.
Somewhat curiously, Turkey's ratings have barely
budged over the last decade, and have been
consistently classified as a Partly Free country. In
2005, FH assigned Turkey a 3 in both PR and CL,
and the only change since then was a one-point
drop in 2012's CL rating down to 4.
The PR and CL, as well as their subcategory,
scores are available on FH’s website. Using these,
the graphs below plot the evolution of the PR and
CL total scores for Turkey between 2005-2015
(which is the period for which FH provides this
data), as well as the 25th, 50th, and 75th global
percentiles from the annual world distribution of
the respective scores. The latter allows gauging
not just the absolute performance of Turkey but
also that relative to the rest of the world.
3. 3
Figure 1. Freedom House Category Scores
Note: The red lines in the upper (lower) graph indicate the
Political Rights (Civil Liberties) score. The dashed gray lines
indicate the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles.
Turkey’s PR score (upper graph) is relatively flat
over the decade with a 4-point drop after 2013,
while the CL score (lower graph) has been falling
since 2010 and was stagnant in the period before.
Whereas Turkey started the period with a CL
score just below the median country, it ended
closer to the 25th percentile. None of the years
show any indication of expanding freedoms
during AKP’s rule.
The disaggregation of these scores into
subcategories sheds further light on which of the
latter have driven the former. For Turkey,
especially relevant subcategories are the political
pluralism and freedom of expression. The former
refers to the degree to which people can organize
in political groupings, credible opportunities for a
political opposition, freedom from
outside interference, and political rights for ethnic
minorities. (This has clear links with the political
barriers to entry such as the ten-percent threshold,
the banning of political parties, and the
persecution of Kurdish political activists in
Turkey.) The latter subcategory refers to freedoms
related to media, culture, religion, and academics,
as well as the degree of freedom from government
surveillance. Turkey’s subscores are plotted
below, grouped by PR and CL:
Figure 2. Freedom House Subcategory
Scores
101520253035402005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
Political Rights Score
20253035404550552005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
Civil Liberties Score
67891011122005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
Electoral Process Pol. Pluralism & Participation
Functioning of Government
Political Rights
567891011122005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
Freedom of Expr. & Belief Ass. & Org. Rights
Rule of Law Personal Autonomy & Ind. Rights
Civil Liberties
On the Timing of Turkey’s Authoritarian Turn
4. 4
In Figure 2, there is rather striking fall in both the
political pluralism (red in upper graph) and
freedom of expression (blue in lower graph). The
other subscores tend to be more stagnant over
time, and the only subcategory that exhibited any
significant positive momentum during the period
is Electoral Process, although by 2015 it had
reverted to its 2005 value. The falls in political
pluralism and freedom of expression are large in
magnitude, from 12 to 9 in the former, and 12 to 8
in the latter. Taking the latter decrease at face
value would imply that Turkish citizens in 2015
have two-thirds of the freedoms of expression that
they enjoyed in 2005. Moreover, the clear majority
of the falls in both these variables occured before
2013 – the post-2013 fall in freedom of expression
accounts for only one fourth of the total fall
observed since 2007.
Given the degree to which civil liberties have
eroded faster than that of political rights in
Turkey, this begs the question how its inherent
degree of illiberalism has evolved relative to other
democracies. For this purpose, I plot the Freedom
of Expression subcategory (a part of the CL score)
against the PR score for the 2015. This latter score
is used by FH to classify countries into whether
they can be called 'electoral democracies' or not
(CL subcategories have no bearing on this
classification):
“An ‘electoral democracy’ designation requires a score
of 7 or better in subcategory A (Electoral Process) and
an overall Political Rights score of 20 or better.”
FH thus classifies Turkey as an electoral
democracy - its Electoral Process is consistently
above 7 (see upper graph in Figure 2) and PR score
above 20 (see Figure 1). But are there many FH-
classified electoral democracies with similar levels
of freedom of expression? Figure 3 answers this
question:
Figure 3. Freedom House Subcategory
Scores
Note: Green = Autocracy, blue = Democracy, Red
= Turkey. The dashed green/blue lines indicate
the median values for autocracies/democracies.
In 2015, Turkey is much closer to the median
autocracy than the median democracy in terms of
freedom of expression. Numerous autocracies
have higher levels of freedom of expression than
Turkey, and only two other electoral democracies
have lower values of this variable: Bangladesh and
Pakistan.
Consequently, Turkey today is a clear outlier due
to its freedom of expression deficit among the
countries classified as electoral democracies by
FH. Yet the slide in Turkeys’ freedoms did not
start in the last couple of years but has remained a
pervasive feature of its institutional trajectory
during the last decade.
Much of Turkey’s erosion of freedoms would not
be as visible using only the most aggregate seven-
point scaled ratings, as these obfuscate important
changes within the rating scores. A shift in
analysts’ focus to more disaggregated data may
thus be useful in order to detect warning signs in a
more timely fashion.
HTI
TKM
BLR
PRK
MLI
MMR
DJI
MRT
LAO
GMB
SWZ
KGZ
YEM
KAZ
MAR
ETH
SYR
IRN
GNQ
ERI
MDV
ZWE
LBN
SDN
CHN
UZB
AFG
TCD
CAF
CMR
TJK
CUB
ARM
AZE
AGO
BRN
EGY
HND
RUS
SGP
COD
UGA
MYS
QAT
GAB
BFA
IRQ
OMN
GNB
RWA
JOR
SAU
ARE
LBY
BHR
KWTTHA
MOZ
TGO
SOM
KHM
VEN
COG
NIC
GIN
VNM
MKD
DZA
BDI
HRV
IDN
GTM
GRC
MNG
DNKMLT
TTOBRA
LUXAND
NGA
BHS
MWI
KNA
LIECRI
PAN
TWN
NER
SWE
BGD
TZA
SRBLSO
AUS
STP
PNG
CYPCHELCA
DEU
BIH
MNE
ALB
BWA
NOR
ARG
WSM
LBR
COLSLEECU
TUV
LVA
SLB
JAM
NZL
KIR
PRY
EST
BEN
FJI
ISL
GRD
IND
KOR
GEO
MCO
GHA
CIV
CHL
SVK
SLV
ATG
JPN
SYC
MDG
NRU
IRL
FSM
TLS
PER
ISR
CZE
BGR
BTN
AUT
GUY
UKR
FIN
TON
MDA
VUT BLZ
KEN
CPV
COM
LKA
BRB
ZMB
NAM
DMA
PRT
MUS
PAK
ROU
MHL
NPL
SMR
LTU
ZAF
MEX
SEN BEL
PHL FRA
ESP
NLD
HUN
ITA
DOMBOL
VCT
PLW
SUR
SVN
USA
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TUN
CAN
GBR
POL
TUR
0481216
0 10 20 30 40
Political Rights Score
Score
On the Timing of Turkey’s Authoritarian Turn
5. *
Finally, the severe deficit in freedoms in countries
nonetheless classified by Freedom House as
electoral democracies raises the issue of whether
there should be a lower freedom bound to
inclusion into the group of democracies in the
world. And if so, what should determine such a
lower bound?
References
Freedom House, 2016, “Freedom of the World 2016.”
Guriev, Sergei, and Daniel Treisman, 2015, “How Modern
Dictators Survive: An Informational Theory of the New
Authoritarianism”, NBER Working Paper No 21136.
Meyersson, Erik, and Dani Rodrik, “Erdogan’s Coup”,
Foreign Affairs, May 26th
, 2014,
Mukand, Sharun, and Dani Rodrik, 2016, “The Political
Economy of Liberal Democracy”,working paper.
Rodrik, Dani, 2014, “A General’s Coup”, mimeo.
Strömberg, David, 2015, “Media and Politics”, Annual
Review of Economics, 7: 173-205.
Erik Meyersson
Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics
(SITE)
Erik.Meyersson@hhs.se
www.erikmeyersson.com
Erik Meyersson is an Assistant Professor at the
Stockholm Institute of Transition Econonomics
(SITE). He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the
Institute for International Economic Studies (IIES)
at Stockholm University. Meyersson’s research is
in political economics and development, with a
particular focus on empirical research. He also has
a special interest in the Middle East in general,
and Turkey in particular.
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