Elite Networks and Personalized Rule

• In Event: International Political Networks: Elites, Institutions, Diplomacy, & Crises

Abstract

The erosion of democracy by democratically elected incumbents is one of the twenty-first century's most common forms of democratic backsliding. While much work focuses on the implications of these processes for the judiciary, press, and the security apparatus, there is less attention on how a leader’s inner circle changes as a result of increasingly personalistic rule. In 2001, Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (Ak Party) was founded and it has been ruling Turkey since 2002. We look into the changes in the network of ruling party elites that accompanied Turkey’s trajector. We focus on the Central Decision-making and Administrative Committee (MKYK) of the Ak Party, which is the main internal decision-making body of the Party. We use an original dataset of all members of the MKYK and all cabinet ministers in the 2001 to 2021 period. The MKYK is renewed approximately every two years and there have been 10 terms in this period. 238 unique individuals have been members of the MKYK in 20 years. We add cabinet ministers, who are also members of the leader’s inner circle, which makes the total number of unique individuals 284. The average MKYK member stays on a little over two terms. For every term, we collect data on the relationships between members of the ruling elite using Google search results that mention both individuals of a dyad. Using tools of network analysis, we show the changing structure of the elite network in Turkey’s ruling party in the 2001-2021 period. In particular, we show 1) how Erdogan becomes more predictive of heavier ties over time using a Poisson model with quadratic assignment procedure, 2) how certain individuals fall out of the inner circle over time. We also contribute to the study of elite networks in the absence of direct data on relationships between actors by using Google search results instead.

Authors

• Omer Faruk Yalcin, University of Massachusetts Amherst

• Firat Kimya, Swarthmore College

• Abdullah Sait Ozcan