Social Policy and Reform Studies

Turkey has one of the widest male–female employment gaps in the world. The post-1950 interplay between economic growth strategies and the male-breadwinner family led to distinct gendered labor market outcomes in the import-substitution versus the export-led growth periods. Examination of aggregate employment data in t…

Recent studies on institutional theory and the public policy field called for efforts to pry open the black box of institutional and policy change. This article offers a response to this call. It demonstrates that historical and discursive institutionalist approaches are complementary to explain how and why institutio…

Abstract Informed by the debates on the transformation of welfare states in advanced industrial economies, this article evaluates the changing role of the state in welfare provision in Turkey. Turkey's welfare state has long been limited and inegalitarian. Strong family ties coupled with indirect and informal channels…

• SADİYE MİNE EDER

Many scholars claim that democracy improves population health. The prevailing explanation for this is that democratic regimes distribute health-promoting resources more widely than autocratic regimes. The central contention of this article is that democracies also have a significant pro-health effect regardless of pub…

• SIMON DRUMMOND VIGLEY

Many scholars claim that democracy improves population health. The prevailing explanation for this is that democratic regimes distribute health-promoting resources more widely than autocratic regimes. The central contention of this article is that democracies also have a significant pro-health effect regardless of pub…

• ARZU SEYHAN AKKOYUNLU VIGLEY

Can we argue that pressures generated from grassroots politics are responsible for the rapid expansion and ethnically/racially uneven distribution of social assistance programs in emerging economies? This article analyzes the Turkish case and shows that social assistance programs in Turkey are directed disproportionat…

• ERDEM YÖRÜK

This paper is an attempt to provide a political economic analysis of the changing nature of Turkish modernity since the 1980s, especially in the 1990s. Our analysis is founded upon the three years-long research (1999–2002) we have done on the question of ‘the impacts of globalization on Turkey’. The Turkish economy ha…

• BERRİN KOYUNCU LORASDAĞI

This article deals with the politics of care and the changing features of familialism in Turkey under the rule of the Justice and Development Party (AKP). While sacred familialism, which is built on the role of women as devoted care providers and blessed mothers, is evident in the AKP’s gender politics, care has recei…

• BAŞAK AKKAN

How can voters make sense of economic outcomes they observe when deciding whether to reelect the incumbent? I propose a reference point theory of economic voting that emphasizes voters’ need for reference points when evaluating incumbents’ performance. Consideration of economic outcomes during the incumbent’s term rel…

• SELİM ERDEM AYTAÇ

Abstract While there is a considerable literature concerning policy entrepreneurship and institutional isomorphism, significantly less literature has emerged addressing the impact of context on policy and institutional entrepreneurship and of the interactions between various contexts and agency. In this article, we de…

What are the dynamics of distributive politics in a setting of multiparty competition? Existing studies on the allocation of resources across multiple electoral districts focus primarily on a setting of two-party competition and consider only the core versus swing district hypotheses. This framework does not correspon…

• SELİM ERDEM AYTAÇ

This article focuses on how the Turkish state has been responding to limit the public health effects of COVID-19 pandemic to date. It aims to explain and understand the introduction, implementation and effect of health policy instrument mixes. It argues that although 'presidentialisation' of executive, and 'presidenti…