Name or Substance? A Symptomatic Reading of Concepts of Authoritarian Transformation in Turkey

Abstract

This article examines competitive authoritarianism, authoritarian neoliberalism, and late fascism not as competing regime labels, but as distinct analytical frameworks for understanding Turkey’s authoritarian transformation. Through a symptomatic reading, it asks what each concept renders visible and what it marginalizes. The article shifts the regime debate from the search for the “correct” label to the relations through which authoritarianism operates: electoral competition, class relations, identity-based domination, extra-economic coercion, and consent production. In the final section, a class-identity matrix shows how class exploitation and identity-based domination are articulated within the entanglement of expanded reproduction and primitive accumulation, and processed through electoral competition.