Turkey Academic: Kesselman

In the CHP Cabinet Room

Finding a comparative politics text book that has a chapter on Turkey is more difficult than one might think. The book I currently use, Hauss’ Comparative Politics does not have a chapter, even in the online supplemental materials. The publisher of that text (Cengage) does have other comparative politics texts and one of them, Kesselman did have a chapter on Turkey among its online resources, written by a Turkish scholar Ersin Kalaycioglu. So that's what I read to provide the academic foundation for understanding Turkish politics.

The High Court Statues: Justice & Atatürk

I found one, so what's the big deal? Well, first, there are several approaches to the study of comparative politics; institutional & cultural, just to name the two most common. No matter which approach one takes, the SOP (standard operating procedure) is to take that approach and apply it to several countries. After doing that the patterns (similarities and differences) begin to appear and make sense.

Turkey is not one of the countries included by most authors in their set. To me this is a surprise considering the dearth of democracies where the dominant religion is Muslim and the importance of understanding the intersection of Islam and democracy to the United States, a country with its army in two such countries, trying to build a democracy and get out.

Local Political Party HQ

What this means to me is that the type of chapter I would want for my students - one with a focus on history and culture - does not appear to be available for Turkey. The Kesselman chapter I read does a good job setting out for students the context of Turkish politics (history and demographics) and provides an overview of key players (institutions) but does not explore what I think is the most interesting question: why Turkey is the way it is. Another issue with the chapter is that it appears to have been completed in 2004 - more than six years ago. A lot has happened in Turkey in the last six years. It is past time for an update.

This presents a dilemma. I would like to include Turkey as a formal part of my course, but how do you do it without appropriate reading material?