Exceptional legislation in the Turkish parliament: Explaining temporal patterns of law-making (1991-2015)

This dissertation investigates the normalization of exceptional legislative procedures and law types in the Turkish Grand National Assembly (TGNA) between 1991 and 2015. These are mainly omnibus legislation, expedited procedure, and decree-law—initially designed as extraordinary measures— apart from ordinary law-making. Drawing on two original datasets and a multi-level institutionalist framework, the study combines qualitative and quantitative methods to explain why and how these non-standard tools became embedded in parliamentary practice. Contrary to expectations that such instruments are primarily used by weak or minority governments or in extraordinary periods, findings reveal their extensive deployment by strong single-party governments in ordinary times. The analysis identifies temporal control, rather than legislative necessity, as a central motivation: exceptional procedures offer ruling parties the ability to accelerate law-making, bypass opposition, and manage political timing, especially during election periods and recesses. External pressures—such as EU harmonization and economic crises—contributed to initial procedural innovations, but their persistence is best explained by actors' strategic use of time. The study also documents the formal and informal institutional changes that enabled the routinization of exceptional legislation. It contributes to broader debates on legislative rationalization, democratic backsliding, and the strategic manipulation of parliamentary time, offering both empirical insight and conceptual innovation in the study of legislative politics.