Nuancing Conventional Wisdom on State-Business Relations in Turkey: The Case of Technical Product Regulations

A key finding of the literature on state-business relations in Turkey is that these relations suffer from a lack of institutionalisation. In particular, the absence of an institutionalised incorporation of business into mechanisms of consultation with the state would be due to a lack of cohesiveness...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Frédéric Misrahi
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Association pour la Recherche sur le Moyen-Orient 2015-03-01
Series:European Journal of Turkish Studies
Subjects:
Online Access:https://journals.openedition.org/ejts/3804
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:A key finding of the literature on state-business relations in Turkey is that these relations suffer from a lack of institutionalisation. In particular, the absence of an institutionalised incorporation of business into mechanisms of consultation with the state would be due to a lack of cohesiveness on both sides of the relationship. This article, however, finds that relations between the state and a number of business sectors are highly institutionalised in the policy area of technical product regulations. Such institutionalisation takes the form of technical committees. This contribution also finds evidence that some of the sectors concerned were not particularly cohesive at the time of the committees’ establishment, thus running counter to the ‘no-institutionalisation-because-fragmentation’ thesis. It explains institutionalised incorporation by the presence of a strong ‘EU effect’ (Europeanisation), and shows how this effect, in the policy at hand, conforms to the predictions of the literature on policy networks and of recent theorising on state-business relations in the context of regulatory trade matters. The article then assesses the implications of this phenomenon for the future of state-business relations in the country and, finally, makes suggestions for future research.
ISSN:1773-0546