Review of Middle East Studies, 52(1), 43–53 © Middle East Studies Association of North America, Inc. 2018 DOI:10.1017/rms.2018.10 SPECIAL FOCUS ON TURKEY THE EVOLUTION OF A REFERENDUM The Perils of “Turkish Presidentialism” * Berk Esen Bilkent University Sebnem Gumuscu Middlebury College Abstract Turkey has switched to a presidential system via a referendum held in April 2017 that will take full effect after the 2019 presidential elections. Turkish presidentialism increases the prominence of the executive at the expense of the legislative branch and concentrates power in the office of the president. Executive aggrandizement will deepen ideological polarization and electoral mobilization by significantly raising the stakes of the game for both the incumbent and the opposition. As such, we posit that the new presidential system will institutionalize the de facto personalism and majoritarian rule that the AKP has hitherto established in recent years. This trend is likely to trigger a transition from a competitive authoritarian to hegemonic electoral authoritarianism in case of Tayyip Erdo˘ gan’s election, thus placing Turkey on par with the strongest executive systems around the globe such as Russia and Venezuela. Keywords: presidentialism, majoritarianism, AKP, Erdo˘ gan, and Turkey O n 16 April 2017, Turkish voters narrowly ratified several constitutional amendments that changed the country’s political system into a presidential one with very limited institutional checks and balances. The new system ends Turkey’s century-old experience with the parliamentary model and embarks the country into unchartered territory. Constitutional amendments ratified in the referendum will accelerate what has been termed Turkey’s democratic backsliding on three levels. 1 Presidential * Inspired by Juan Linz’s seminal article “The Perils of Presidentialism,” Journal of Democracy 1, no. 1 (Winter 1990): 51–69. 1 For literature on the move toward authoritarianism and presidentialism, see: Berk Esen and Sebnem Gumuscu, “Rising Competitive Authoritarianism in Turkey,” Third World Quarterly 37, no. 9 (February 2016): 1581–1606; Murat Somer, “Understanding Turkey’s Democratic Breakdown: Old vs. New and Indigenous vs. Global Authoritarianism,” Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 16, no. 4 (November 2016): 481–503; Ergun Özbudun, “Turkey’s Judiciary and the Drift toward Competitive Authoritarianism,” The International Spectator 50, no. 2 43 of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/rms.2018.10 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Middlebury College, on 24 May 2018 at 21:41:15, subject to the Cambridge Core terms