An Empirical Study of Lobbying Success in the Context of Turkey’S Accession Negotiations with the European Union

AN EMPIRICAL STUDY OF LOBBYING SUCCESS IN THE CONTEXT OF TURKEY’S ACCESSION NEGOTIATIONS WITH THE EUROPEAN UNION by EDA KUŞKU SÖNMEZ Submitted to the Institute of Social Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science Sabancı University February 2013 AN EMPIRICAL STUDY OF LOBBYING SUCCESS IN THE CONTEXT OF TURKEY’S ACCESSION NEGOTIATIONS WITH THE EUROPEAN UNION APPROVED BY: Meltem Müftüler‐Baç ………………………………………. (Dissertation Supervisor) Emre Hatipoğlu .……………………………………… Fuat Keyman ………………………………………. İzak Atiyas ………………………………………. Sabri Sayarı ………………………………………. DATE OF APPROVAL: 27/02/2013 I dedicate this dissertation to my grandfather, Emin Ali, who currently passed away and eternalized the absence I had felt in all my experience for he lived abroad in Bulgaria. He was a religious figure -an imam [priest in a mosque] and well at the same time one of the most open-minded and tolerant elderly I know of. This mindset was his primary heritage and is among the building blocks of my ideas about conservatism and tolerance. © Eda Kuşku Sönmez 2013 All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT AN EMPIRICAL STUDY OF LOBBYING SUCCESS IN THE CONTEXT OF TURKEY’S ACCESSION NEGOTIATIONS WITH THE EUROPEAN UNION EDA KUŞKU SÖNMEZ PhD Dissertation, Spring 2013 Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Meltem Müftüler-Bac Keywords: Europeanization, interest groups, lobbying, lobbying coalitions, issue conflict, lobbing success, gender mainstreaming, Alevi rights, and freedom of the press Historical analysis of the relationship between the State and civil society in Turkey demonstrate the problematic nature of interactions between these domains. All through the Turkish political history, the actors within civil society had been subject to inherent legal and structural limits in terms of access to the political level and thus had been relegated to a weak-standing. This historical legacy of civil society’s portrayal as inept and devoid of any real role in politics had eventuated in academic lack of interest concerning possible transformations in the civil society’s potential. Over the last decade, the European Union (EU) negotiation framework has provided a new opportunity context enhancing the chances of decision making participation of groups that operate within the Turkish civil society. One should consider the positive impact of the EU pressures for regular and structural participation of these previously excluded stakeholders. Lobbying groups’ increasing access to the political level should have implications for policy outputs; still this access alone is not enough to determine lobbying success. Taking into account Turkey’s domestic political setting in flux, what could be some other factors easing or hindering lobbying success? This dissertation aims to answer this question. To this end, it provides comparative analysis of lobbying activities under three alternative issue areas -gender mainstreaming, Alevi rights and press freedoms- which heavily occupied the reform agenda of Turkey in the last decade. With a specific focus on the degree of conflict on these issues; the dissertation demonstrates that conflicts had arisen primarily due to ideology and identity based polarizations in Turkey such as the controversy between secularism versus religious conservatism. The dissertation deliberates on how such polarizations impact lobbying success and moderate the impact of other potential explanatory factors. In the case of an EU negotiating country, one should also take into account how the EU’s adaptational pressures determine the direction of reforms and thus lobbying success. Incorporating the impact of this special context, our analytical model is additionally expected to shed light on the literature on Europeanization that concentrate on transposition processes in the Turkish case. v ÖZET TÜRKİYE’NİN AVRUPA BİRLİĞİ KATILIM MÜZAKERELERİ BAĞLAMINDA LOBİCİLİK BAŞARISI ÜZERİNE AMPİRİK BİR ÇALIŞMA EDA KUŞKU SÖNMEZ Doktora Tezi, Bahar 2013 Danışman: Prof. Dr. Meltem Müftüler-Bac Anahtar Sözcükler: Avrupalılaşma, çıkar grupları, lobicilik, lobi koalisyonları, ihtilaf, lobicilik başarısı, toplumsal cinsiyet eşitliği, Alevi hakları, basın özgürlüğü Türkiye’deki sivil toplum-devlet ilişkisinin tarihsel analizi bu iki alan arasındaki etkileşimin problemli olduğunu ortaya koymaktadır. Sivil toplum alanındaki aktörler, Türk siyasi tarihi boyunca siyaset alanına erişim açısından yasal ve yapısal bir takım sınırlamalara maruz kalmış; dolayısıyla da oldukça zayıf bir konuma indirgenmişlerdir. Sivil toplumu siyasette gerçek bir rol oynamaktan yoksun ve bu konuda yeteneksiz olarak resmeden tarihsel miras, sivil toplumun potansiyelindeki olası dönüşümlere yönelik akademik ilgisizlikle sonuçlanmıştır. Ancak geçtiğimiz on yılda Türkiye’nin Avrupa Birliği (AB) ile müzakere süreci, sivil toplumda etkin olarak çalışan gruplara yeni bir fırsat ortamı sağlamış ve bu grupların karar alma süreçlerine katılım şansını arttırmıştır. Daha önceden bu süreçlerden dışlanan bu paydaşların düzenli ve kurumsal katılımını sağlayacak mekanizmaların oluşturulması yönündeki AB baskılarının olumlu bir etkisi olduğu düşünülebilir. Lobici grupların siyaset alanına artan erişimi siyasa çıktılarını etkileyecektir; ancak bu erişim lobicilik başarısı için tek başına yeterli değildir. Türkiye’nin sürekli değişen iç politika ortamı dikkate alındığında, lobicilik başarısını destekleyen veya engelleyen diğer bir takım faktörler neler olabilir? Bu tez bu soruya cevap vermeyi amaçlamaktadır. Bu amaçla, son on yılda Türkiye’nin gündeminde sıkça yer alan üç alternatif konudaki –toplumsal cinsiyet, Alevi hakları ve basın özgürlüğü- reform süreçlerine yönelik lobicilik faaliyetleri karşılaştırmalı olarak incelenmektedir. Öncelikle bu süreçlerin ne ölçüde ihtilaflı olduğuna odaklanan tez; Türkiye’deki ihtilafların özellikle ideoloji ve kimlik temelli laiklik-muhafazakârlık gibi polarizasyonlardan kaynaklandığını ortaya koymaktadır. Bu tip polarizasyonların lobicilik başarısına etkisi ile, lobicilik başarısını açıklamada kullanılan diğer potansiyel faktörlerin etkisini azaltması tartışılmaktadır. AB ile müzakere sürecinde olan bir ülke söz konusu olduğunda, bu sürecin adaptasyon baskıları ve bu baskıların reformların gidişatını ve dolayısıyla lobicilik başarısını nasıl etkilediği de dikkate alınmalıdır. Bu özel yapının da etkisi incelemeye dâhil edilerek oluşturulan analitik model, Avrupa hukukunun Türkiye’nin iç hukukuna aktarım süreçlerine yoğunlaşan Avrupalılaşma literatürüne de ışık tutmayı amaçlamaktadır. vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I feel exceptionally fortunate to have applied to Sabancı University for my graduate study which provided me with the opportunity to move on with an integrated Political Science PhD program throughout which I had been educated by great professors and made great friends. First and foremost, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my dissertation advisor Meltem Müftüler-Bac who has been extremely caring, responsive and encouraging in her guidance for the dissertation. She also represented a role model all through my PhD with her special style of tutoring, commitment to academic progress of every student and tasteful academic areas of interest. I also would like to thank to all of my committee members. I am grateful to Işık Özel for helping me a lot on developing the hypothesis of this dissertation with her stimulating critiques, comments and support in the most challenging phases of dissertation writing. She was part of the dissertation committee; but she could not attend the final defense since she currently tutors in Germany. I am also thankful to İzak Atiyas who accepted to partake in the dissertation committee despite the differences in our academic areas of interest and he contributed a lot to the dissertation with his challenging questions, inspiring ideas, valuable comments and critiques. I would also like to thank to Sabri Sayarı, Fuat Keyman and Emre Hatipoğlu for reading the dissertation and for their insightful comments and critiques. I am highly indebted to all my committee members for the friendly environment and the average level of stress without which I would be dragged either into lethargy or into panic. I should express my special thanks to amazing friends Ayşe Ezgi Gürcan and Aybars Görgülü who offered me the motivation to conclude this dissertation with vigorous discussions, invaluable feedbacks, and encouragement. I am grateful that our friendship became perpetual and is not limited to PhD. I am also thankful to Sumru Küçüka for her special friendship and time, whose emotional and technical contributions had helped me a lot. vii I should save the most important thanks to my family. I am indebted to my mother, my father and my mother-in-law for their prayers, encouragement and support all through my academic progression. I should also thank my husband Ümit Sönmez who shared my stress since the first days of our marriage and did his level best to secure me with the time to complete this dissertation. I am grateful for his understanding given the amount of work I have to get through and for his patience when he had to listen to the problems only interesting to me. I should acknowledge that I alone am responsible for the possible errors and omissions in this dissertation. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF TABLES……………………………………………………………………..xii LIST OF FIGURES…………………………………………………………………....xiii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS…………………………………………………………xiv INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………….1 CHAPTER 1 THE ANALYSIS OF INTEREST GROUP INFLUENCE AND

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