Incorporating Youth into the Political Arena: Elite Structures, Elite-youth Linkages, and Youth (De-) mobilization in post-1960 Turkey (1960-2016)
This dissertation investigates why the Turkish state encountered sustained youth contention and failed to contain it in the 1960s and the 1970s, while it proved more capable in preventing the emergence/escalation of youth dissent in the post-1980 period. Studies on social movements have not treated youth as a central category (Bayat 2010) and have under-theorized the processes of youth mobilization and demobilization. Besides, scholars of state-society relations in the Global South have paid scant attention to the political role of youth and elite attempts at incorporating young people into the political and economic structures. This study undertakes a comparative-historical analysis of political elite-youth linkages to explain the trajectory of youth political participation in post-1960 Turkey. By elite-youth linkages, I refer to the attempts of the power-holder elites at regulating youth political participation in accordance with their particular interests and to the ways young people benefit from, negotiate, or at times challenge elite claims to exert control over youth political agency. This study contends that the more fragmented the Turkish elites in the period from 1960 to 1980, the more they turned to participate themselves in youth mobilization via the process of partisan incorporation. Elite fragmentation in part facilitated militant youth behavior, left the Turkish state vulnerable to youth contention, and created youth mobilization that was sustained over a long period. The more cohesive the Turkish elites in the post-1980 coup period, the more they turned away from establishing partisan linkages with youth and the more they subscribed to incorporation as moderation and control. Elite cohesion curbed the mobilizational capacity of youth and ultimately triggered youth political disengagement. Finally, the more the ruling party elites perceived threats to emerging elite hegemony in the post-2010 period, the more they adopted hybrid incorporation to secure incumbency and sustain political hegemony. Elite hegemony weakened oppositional youth politics and politically empowered pro-government youth.
elite studies, state-society relations, Turkish Politics, Youth politics
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations