Democratic deliberation in Turkey: AK Party government's political and democratic opening process (2002-2016)

This thesis explores the deliberation process in Turkey (2009-2015) based on the democracy literature through a large scale deliberation perspective. The research is mainly built upon views obtained from discussions regarding the scale and characteristics of deliberation, which have drawn a good deal of interest recently in deliberation research and discussions on deeply divided societies. This thesis study is laid out on the following research question: how does a deliberation process work in a deeply divided society? In order to answer this question, the analytical approach developed by Dembinska and Montambeault (2015) is adopted, which allows for a large scale analysis of deliberation and views it as three distinct "moments" of "pre-deliberation," "deliberation at the table" and "deliberation outside the table" rather than reducing deliberation to one moment. Research data is obtained mainly from 20 in-depth and open-ended interview with high and medium level actors who took part in the deliberation process in Turkey and press releases of high level actors. Moreover, the discourse at the deliberation table is assessed through discourse quality index. The main argument of this study is that in contexts where polarization, conflict and social marginalization levels are high, individual psychological obstacles and group opposition make deliberation impossible. In Turkey's deliberation process regarding the Kurdish conflict, deliberation complicated the existing conflicts even further rather than deescalating them, incensed the attitudes and situations in an unproductive manner, and amplified the factions. So much so that, even formal procedures and moldable cognitive conditions failed to get in the way of polarization and negative attitudes, the conflicted parties entered into deliberations with a rigid mental model and point of view, and the deliberation did not yield the desired result as the conflicted parties saw it as a theater of war in which they were decisive to overcome the opposing party.