ABSTRACT

This article examines the personalization of Turkish politics during Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s third term as prime minister. While many studies focus on the prime minister’s growing personal domination of the executive branch, we consider how leaders of the opposition reflected and reinforced that trend. To test our hypotheses on this ‘Erdoğanization,’ we employed a content analysis to consider Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu and Devlet Bahçeli’s speeches at weekly parliamentary group meetings of the CHP and the MHP. Our findings reveal that, over time, both leaders increasingly referred to the prime minister in proportion to the ruling party. Between the June 2011 parliamentary elections and the August 2014 presidential elections, Kılıçdaroğlu and Bahçeli more frequently targeted Prime Minister Erdoğan with personal insults such as ‘separatist’, ‘dictator’, and ‘thief.’ Specifically, we show that during the PKK Peace Process, the Gezi Park Protests, and the Corruption Scandal, Erdoğanization reached its peak levels. The article’s conceptual framework and empirical findings have implications for the broader literature on the role of opposition in personalized settings.

摘要

本文考察了Recep TayyipErdoğan担任第三任总理期间土耳其政治的个性化情况。尽管许多研究都集中在总理对行政部门的个人支配地位上，但我们考虑反对派领导人如何反映和加强这一趋势。为了检验我们关于“鄂尔多加人化”的假设，我们采用了内容分析方法，在卫生防护中心和MHP的每周一次议会会议上考虑了KemalKılıçdaroğlu和DevletBahçeli的讲话。我们的发现表明，随着时间的流逝，两位领导人都越来越多地按执政党的比例推荐总理。在2011年6月的议会选举到2014年8月的总统选举之间，基尔奇达罗卢和巴赫切利经常以“分裂主义”，“独裁者”，和“小偷”。具体而言，我们表明，在库尔德工人党和平进程，Gezi公园抗议和腐败丑闻期间，埃尔多安化达到了顶峰。本文的概念框架和实证研究结果对反对派在个性化背景下的作用的广泛文献具有启示意义。