The Role of Turkish Civil Society in Political Decision Making
Öz
For consolidation of democracies, political scientists
recognize the normative ideal that civil society should be given an enhanced
role in political decision-making. Analysis of the characteristics and extent
of such role is very central to the study of political science and especially
for democratic theory. Civil society involves organized groups which seek to
exert political influence for the achievement of either communal or member
interests. Therefore, assessing such influence is necessary to understand and
make inferences about these organized interests’ democratic participation which
involves their level of interaction with the larger political system and its
actors, the role played by them in policy making processes and impact of all
these over policy outcomes. This paper first examines the content and methods
of the literature on the impacts of the European Union (EU) process over the
transformation of civil society realm in Turkey. Then, the paper points to lack
of empirical research within this literature on the civil society
organizations’ characteristics of involvement to decision making processes. In
this respect, the paper reveals the convenience of the methodological
approaches of the literature on interest group influence and demonstrates how the
literature on Turkish civil society can benefit from these contributions. The
paper draws attention to the need for future studies to empirically assess the
characteristics and transformation of Turkish civil society’s participation
into the decision making processes.
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Referans 1
Bee, C. and Ayhan Kaya (2017), “Between practices and demands: ambiguities, controversies and
constraints in the emergence of active citizenship in Turkey”, Southeast European and
Black Sea Studies, 17 (3): 301-324.