Hükümetlerin politika gündemleri: 1983 sonrası kanunlar üzerine bir inceleme

Abstract

This article studies the policy priorities of Turkish governments through an analysis of government-sponsored laws that were enacted in the parliamentary period between 1983 and 2015. The entire list of government-sponsored laws enacted over 32 years was coded according to the coding system of the “Comparative Agendas Project” (CAP). In this way, governments’ policy priorities are determined by measuring the overall legislative performances of the governments based on different issue areas of laws. First, the article assesses the impact of various factors such as government type (single party-coalition governments) and government duration on the variation in the overall legislative performance of governments. Second, it engages in a comparative analysis of the issue areas of laws and highlights similarities and differences in the policy priorities and the political agendas of different governments. This analysis also discusses the impact of factors emphasized in the literature such as inter-party competition, international organizations, and crises independent of governments on the policy agenda of Turkish governments. As the study focuses on the post-1983 period, the article’s findings provide a detailed assessment of Turkish politics over the last three decades. The article’s findings suggest that legislative performance is positively correlated with government duration and that singleparty governments with longer mandate in office generally have higher legislative performances than coalition governments. Furthermore, the article demonstrates that Turkish governments primarily enacted laws in the areas of international relations, state administration, macroeconomics, justice crime and family issues, and defense policy and hence prioritized these areas more than the others.