Peasants, Bankers and the State: Forging Institutions in Neoliberal Turkey

• Main Author: Guven, Ali Burak
• Other Authors: Sandbrook, Richard
• Language: en_ca
• Published: 2006
• Subjects: institutions; institutional change; Turkey; finance; agriculture; political economy; 0615
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1807/29950

The recent rediscovery of institutions in the study of international development has drawn considerable attention to macro arrangements, but sparked much less interest in mid-range, sectoral institutions and how they are reshaped under dynamic domestic and nondomestic constraints. This study joins the few examples of this latter research focus by offering a typology of sectoral institutional pathways in contemporary late developers. The typology incorporates four variables: pre-existing institutions, international norms, technocratic engineering, and coalition politics. It is argued that from careful pairings of these variables, for which the sectoral effects of internationalization and the intensity of domestic political competition are used as the main criteria, it is possible to deduce distinct ideal-typical pathways: insulated accommodation, insulated innovation, negotiated accommodation, and negotiated innovation. The typology models the complexity of institutional trajectories, but it cannot predict concrete institutional profiles. Its value is in providing guidance for empirical analysis. The bulk of the study is devoted to applying this framework to the evolution of Turkey’s fiscal, financial and agricultural regimes of governance from 1980 to 2007. This comparative exercise unlocks several empirical mysteries at once: the failure of Turkish governments in the 1990s to readjust the novel fiscal and banking regimes to preempt the perils of democratic instability and rapid financial integration; the surprising persistence of populist-corporatist forms of market governance in agriculture despite the neoliberalism of the 1980s and 1990s; the stark divergence in reform outcomes across these regimes during the intense restructuring efforts of the 2000s; some odd instances of institutional complementarity; and the exotic twists in the fortunes of Turkish peasants and bankers throughout the entire period. A separate chapter extends the typology to four non-Turkish cases to gain comparative insight into the different types of reshaping: Chinese banking, South Korean corporate governance, Mexican agriculture, and Argentine labor markets. Among the main findings of the study are the need to get beyond dichotomous notions of institutional continuity and change, the problematicity of the quest for good institutions via externally-inspired reforms, and the value of mid-range institutional analysis for understanding shifts in collective fortunes and preferences under processes of macro-transformation.