Deparliamentarization in Turkey: A Major Decline in the Scrutiny Function

Abstract

In parliamentary democracies, governments are formed through parliamentary elections, and both thecabinet and budget must receive the confidence of the legislature. The “golden age”, when parliamentsmake laws without any pressure from the executives and have strong control over cabinets, ended by20th century. For the last few decades, however, legislative studies have been pointing to a shift in thebalance of power from the legislative to the executive branch in many countries. The declining powerof parliaments is explained by many factors. Scholars who studied “declining parliaments” generallyagree on the commonly accepted contributing factors for deparliamentarization. These factors are“constitutional arrangements, increasing global regulations, the complexity of issues and technicalfocusin policy making, disciplinary party structures, the lack of intra-party democracy, the dominationof parties by their leaders, and electoral systems.” Although a trend of deparliamentarization has beennoted, mainly in parliamentary democracies, the decline of parliaments has not been as glaring andforbidding everywhere. Thus, the variation, especially among similar democratic systems, calls fora closer analysis of country cases. This study examines Turkey, and discusses the changes regardingthe power balance between the executive and legislative branches of government by identifying thepattern of changes in constitutions and country’s electoral system, and party structures which tendto stress party discipline and maintain leaders’ control. The paper analyzes the politics of Turkeybetween 1946 and 2014 especially by focusing on the AKP rule after 2002. The power shift in Turkeyhas been from parliamentary supremacy to a very strong executive, and deparliamentarization hasbeen particularly rapid and profound since the 1980s,. In 2017, a change in the constitution allowed atransition to a presidential system and the new system is legalized by the constitutional amendments.The paper concludes with the analysis that there is a significant decline in the power of the parliamentin Turkey, after 1980s, mainly in its scrutiny function. The longitudinal study of changes shows thatdeparliamentarization, or the increase in the power of the executive, was caused by multiple domesticand international factors that occurred simultaneously and reinforced each other’s impact. Thesignificant difference of Turkey from the other world cases are rapid constitutional changes, increasingleader authority within the parties, and existence of dominant party system in Turkey since 15 years.