Turkey’s communicative authoritarianism

Abstract

The majority of current political communication studies focus on discursive dimensions of communications and disregard how communications partake in the governing of populations through economic, material and institutional practices. By focusing on Turkey’s case, here I move beyond this approach and examine the role of communications in the development of neoliberal capital accumulation, authoritarian welfare politics, political repression and the production of popular support. The article provides an empirical analysis of policy developments and plans and the restructuring of ownership and control of networks between 2002 and 2016 in Erdoğan’s Turkey.

Theorizing and mapping media ownership networks in authoritarian-populist contexts: a comparative analysis of Austria, Hungary, Slovenia, and Turkey

“…If Hungary is one of the extreme cases of authoritarian populism, Turkey can be considered an even more extreme case as it presents a longer period of authoritarian-populist governance under the uninterrupted rule of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s party from 2002. Like Hungary’s, Turkey’s populist regime sought to undermine checks and balances, enhance institutional regulatory control over the media, whilst using state resources for the empowerment of loyalist business and media groups; all the while, implementing punitive apparatuses against the oppositional forces such as critical media outlets, especially since 2010 (Akca and Bekmen, 2013; Çelik, 2020a; Tuğal, 2022; Yesil, 2016). Taming the opposition was integral to Erdogan’s politics in which he considered all oppositional forces as enemy of the people, famously stating “we are the people, who are you?” In 2018, Erdogan’s party won the majority of votes in a referendum for the constitutional change from multiparty parliamentary democracy into Turkish-style presidential system.…”