Saturday, March 15, 2014
Cabinet (Omni Shoreham)
This article examines the long struggle to reform Turkey’s employment policy throughout the 2000s whereby ideas played a strategic role in framing policy discourse which helped to legitimize the goals of politicians and deflect blame. Nevertheless, the outcome in policy reform is one of a shift towards ‘flexibility’ rather than ‘flexicurity’ which is short of ‘third-order’ change due in large part to the selective appropriation of ideas by dominant actors. This article aims to show the interplay between prevailing policy ideas and dominant actors in a majoritarian political setting in which employment policy constitutes a highly politically sensitive domain. To this end, the article, first, reviews the literature on the role of ideas in policy change and develops alternative hypotheses on ‘scientific’ and ‘constructivist’ models of policy learning. Second, the article evaluates the outcome of policy reform in employment policy by providing an overview of changes throughout the 2000s. Third, it unpacks the process of reform by examining the patterns of interaction among policy ideas, perceived interests and domestic institutions with the aim to test the validity of alternative models of policy learning. This analysis is based on original data produced through 30 qualitative in-depth interviews with key policymakers, representatives of employers and employees as well as other primary sources including programming documents and legislative acts. Finally, the article evaluates the validity of the ‘scientific’ and ‘constructivist’ types of policy learning models in accounting for reform in Turkey’s employment policy.
