The Sociology of Diplomats and Foreign Policy Sector: The Role of Cliques on the Policy-Making Process

Abstract

This paper studies the sociology of elites and the role of cliques on the foreign policy-making process through an exploratory case study of Turkish Ministry for Foreign Affairs. It identifies elite sociology as the independent variable triggering a policy-making process in the Turkish Ministry for Foreign Affairs in line with organisational process or governmental politic approaches. It shows that until the 1980s, the Turkish Ministry for Foreign Affairs was marked by strong hierarchical tradition triggered by a certain career path and cliqueism leading to the homogeneity in the sociology of elites. This in turn triggered a foreign policy-making process based on organisational process. The role of cliqueism weakened along with the incremental circulation of elites in the post-1980s and particularly in the post-2005 period as the elite structure in the Turkish Ministry for Foreign Affairs became even more heterogeneous, foreign policy-making process moved towards governmental politics which allowed taking into account diverse schools of thought. Nevertheless, newly emerging programmatic elites employed deliberate efforts for elite circulation by altering the dominant career path and relying on political appointments. The resulting outcome was the emergence of a new clique of ruling elites subordinate to political elites which led to the politicisation of the foreign policy decision-making process in the post-2011 period.

Informal social groups and policy programs: A Programmatic Action Framework (PAF) on policymaking

“…Although empirical research on the phenomenon of programmatic elites lives on and has been recently applied to Turkish foreign policy (Süleymanoğlu‐Kürüm, 2020), the PAF has been further developed by the integration of social psychological insights of the Social Identity Approach (SIA) (Haslam, 2001; Hogg & Reid, 2006; Hornsey, 2008; Light, 2015) and the respective relevance of social group memberships and group dynamics. In this view, the programmatic groups that actors form are informal social groups whose identity influences the preferences and behaviors of actors populating the policy process (Hornung et al., 2019).…”