Introduction: social policies and social inequalities in contemporary Turkey

Abstract

Turkey undertook a series of social policy reforms in the 2000s, including a large-scale transformation in health care, recalibration of its pension system, the introduction of a new industrial relations regime, reconstruction of its labour market, the launch of a wide range of social assistance programs and alterations in social care arrangements. This wide range of social policy changes and their impact on the patterns of social inequalities in Turkey has created a highly fruitful research agenda that has attracted the considerable interest of academics from different social science disciplines. This special issue contributes to this literature by offering a critical analysis of recent social policy changes and the changing patterns of social inequalities covering an impressive range of issues: social care, child labour, youth unemployment, young women's employment, the role of faith-based organizations in social welfare and the pension reform. This introduction to this special issue briefly reviews the history of social policy development in Turkey and scholarly debates on the direction of social policy changes in the last decade. Then the article examines contemporary policy trends and the patterns of social inequalities in three policy areas, namely, employment and income generation, education, and housing, which are also selected to reveal the changing character of social policy arrangements and to complement the comprehensive picture that this special issue sketches.