Rethinking development space in emerging countries: Turkey's conservative countermovement

Despite an increasingly flexible global policy context, most emerging countries refuse to venture beyond their pre-existing development strategies. This article contends that domestic political constraints under liberalized markets might preclude policy dynamism in some cases. In particular, it draws attention to the tension between market expansion and social cohesion as a formative influence over policy patterns. This tension is sometimes addressed through a conservative countermovement whereby liberally-oriented governments entice sections of the poor into broad electoral coalitions by employing palliative interventions alongside market-expanding policies. Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) is one example. Central to the Turkish case has been the redeployment of the country’s historic foreign capital-dependent pattern of growth in the service of selective redistribution and credit-fuelled consumerism. The ensuing deficit-led neoliberal populism assured stable and equitable growth in the extraordinary international and domestic context of the mid-2000s, but proved unfeasible since the global crisis. Even then, this coupling of market and social preferences has become politically so firmly entrenched in time that it now constrains the policy options to address Turkey’s developmental impasse