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Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14288/6

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Department: search.filters.department.Department of SociologySubject: search.filters.subject.Government and law

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    PublicationOpen Access
    Contentious welfare: the Kurdish conflict and social policy as counterinsurgency in Turkey
    (Wiley, 2020) Department of Sociology; Yörük, Erdem; Yoltar, Çağrı; Faculty Member; Researcher; Department of Sociology; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 28982; N/A
    The period since the 1990s has witnessed the expanding political influence of the Kurdish movement across the country as well as a transformation in the welfare system, manifesting itself mainly in the emergence of extensive social assistance programs. While Turkish social assistance policy has been formally neutral regarding who is entitled to state aid, Kurds have been de facto singled out by these new welfare programs, as is shown by existing quantitative work. Based on a discourse analysis of legislation, parliamentary proceedings, and news media, this article examines the ways in which Turkish governments and policymakers consider the Kurdish question in designing welfare policies. We illustrate that Kurdish mobilization has become a central theme that informed the transformation of Turkish welfare system over the past three decades.
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    PublicationOpen Access
    The politics of social assistance in South Africa: how protests and electoral politics shape the Child Support Grant
    (Wiley, 2021) Gençer, Alper Şükrü; Department of Sociology; Yörük, Erdem; Faculty Member; Department of Sociology; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 28982
    Since the 1990s, South Africa, like many other countries from the Global South, has provided extensive social assistance for the poor. The literature on these policies, however, is largely dominated by structuralist accounts, and it largely overlooks political factors. We conducted quantitative analyses regarding the South African flagship Child Support Grant (CSG) program and investigated how contentious and electoral political dynamics jointly shape the provision of this program. Based on a logistic regression analysis, we measured the effect of protest participation, voting preference, and their interaction on the likelihood of CSG receipt. Our analysis showed that CSG receipt is much higher among "uncontentious supporters" of ANC and "contentious nonsupporters," as well as those who join violent protests. This lends support for our argument that CSG is being used as a tool for electoral politics and containment of unrest, providing fresh evidence for political mediation theories of social policy.
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    PublicationOpen Access
    The politics of the welfare state in Turkey: how social movements and elite competition created a welfare state
    (University of Michigan Press, 2022) Department of Sociology; Yörük, Erdem; Faculty Member; Department of Sociology; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 28982
    In The Politics of the Welfare State in Turkey, author Erdem Yörük provides a politics-based explanation for the post-1980 transformation of the Turkish welfare system, in which poor relief policies have replaced employment-based social security. This book is one of the results of Yörük's European Research Council-funded project, which compares the political dynamics in several emerging markets in order to develop a new political theory of welfare in the global south. As such, this book is an ambitious analytical and empirical contribution to understanding the causes of a sweeping shift in the nature of state welfare provision in Turkey during the recent decades—part of a global trend that extends far beyond Turkey. Most scholarship about Turkey and similar countries has explained this shift toward poor relief as a response to demographic and structural changes including aging populations, the decline in the economic weight of industry, and the informalization of labor, while ignoring the effect of grassroots politics. In order to overcome these theoretical shortages in the literature, the book revisits concepts of political containment and political mobilization from the earlier literature on the mid-twentieth-century welfare state development and incorporates the effects of grassroots politics in order to understand the recent welfare system shift as it materialized in Turkey, where a new matrix of political dynamics has produced new large-scale social assistance programs.