Orcun Selcuk on populist polarisation in Turkey and Latin America

Orçun Selçuk, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Luther College, on "The Authoritarian Divide: Populism, Propaganda, and Polarization" (University of Notre Dame Press).

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The book compares the cases of populism and what you call "affective leader polarization" in Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Venezuela under Hugo Chávez, and Ecuador under Rafael Correa. Why did you focus on these specific examples?

The project started during my PhD. This was in 2013, right after the Gezi Park protests when Turkey was experiencing democratic backsliding. There was conversation around whether Turkey is moving in a more authoritarian direction and discussion about Erdogan as a populist leader. When I was researching the Turkish case, I realised that a significant amount of the literature on populism - especially populism in power - are Latin American case studies.

Scholars often study Turkey as a single case study, or they compare it to cases in the Middle East or Europe. But because of Turkey's peculiar history it doesn't really fully fit into the Middle Eastern context or it doesn't fully fit into the European context. When I was researching this topic, I came to the realisation that Turkey resembles many Latin American countries. Because similar to Venezuela, similar to Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru, and many other South American countries, Turkey is a country where populism came to power and stayed in power through multiple re-elections. And in terms of my case selection, in all three countries the populists ruled for at least a decade. That's very different than case studies of populism in Europe, particularly Western Europe, where populists are primarily the opposition and they never have the chance to govern. The fact that Erdogan and the AKP have been in power since 2002, more than 20 years now, resembles Venezuela under Chavez. Chavez and his successor Maduro have been in power since 1998. So I would say the duration of populism staying in power, but even just populism coming to power in the first place was a good departure point for me. Also when you look at Latin American and Turkish history there are similarities in terms of histories of military regimes and the transition to neoliberalism. In that sense in the 1990s there were a couple of studies in Turkey that compared, for example, Özal with Fujimori in Peru.

So I'm not the first person coming up with the Turkey-Latin America comparison. But I strongly believe it is important to understanding Turkey's dynamics, especially after it became a presidential system. Because European cases are primarily parliamentary democracies. Whereas Turkey in 2017 transitioned to presidentialism. But it's not just any form of presidentialism, it's what we call hyper-presidentialism. So in that sense there are several similarities between Turkey and Latin America despite the geographical differences, cultural differences, colonial legacy and religion. What is common is the fact that populism came to power, polarisation happened, and populist leaders kept getting re-elected.