Erdem Yörük
Biographic Data
| ID | 290019 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Erdem Yörük |
| GIVEN NAMES | Erdem |
| FAMILY NAME | Yörük |
| SIGNATURE | YÖRÜK E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Koç University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4882-0812 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 140 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
AI and the party
This Research Note explores the emerging intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and party politics by applying Katz and Mair’s “three faces” framework to analyze the role of AI in reshaping party organization. While AI is not yet uniformly transforming parties, its growing use in campaigning, policymaking, membership engagement, and internal management introduces new dynamics of centralisation, personalisation, and automation. The note high…
Online gendered violence and visibility in electoral autocracies
Online platforms have become indispensable tools for political candidates to gain visibility, particularly for female candidates in electoral autocracies who often lack access to traditional networks, party hierarchies, and media platforms. We argue that online visibility, while a resource for female candidates, disproportionately exposes them to online violence that functions as a mechanism of political control, reinforcing patriarchal exclusion…
A Computational Analysis of Ideological Positions, Emotional Stance, and Support for Presidential Candidates in Turkey
Using artificial intelligence, this article explores the intricate dynamics between ideologies, emotions, and political preferences of the electorate in Turkey. Utilizing a dataset of one billion posts from X (formerly Twitter), the study maps out political opinions, focusing on support for presidential candidates, ideological stances, and collective emotions around the pivotal 2023 Turkish presidential elections. We discuss the limitations of co…
Does violent conflict affect the distribution of social welfare? Evidence from India's Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act
What are the contentious political dynamics of the largest workfare program in the world, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) of India? Combining quantitative analysis with a close reading of government documents and a survey of the existing literature, we suggest that the Indian government's counter‐insurgency strategy against the Maoist unrest is a significant dynamic shaping the distribution of MGNREGA benefits…
The Politics of the Welfare State in Turkey
In The Politics of the Welfare State in Turkey, author Erdem Yörük provides a politics-based explanation for the post-1980 transformation of the Turkish welfare system, in which poor relief policies have replaced employment-based social security. This book is one of the results of Yörük's European Research Council-funded project, which compares the political dynamics in several emerging markets in order to develop a new political theory of welfar…
The squeaky wheel gets the grease
What are the contemporary determinates of social assistance provision? What is the role of contentious politics? Social assistance literature is dominated by economic and demographic accounts, which under-examine the possibility that governments extend social assistance to contain social unrest. We test factors associated with these "structuralist" and "political" theories on a new panel dataset which includes 54 OECD and emerging market countrie…
Political Determinants of Social Assistance Policies
Social assistance programs and the related literature are proliferating globally. This article conducts a critical systematic review of the literature with objective and transparent selection criteria and illustrates two major shortcomings: First, the literature is largely descriptive and impact-oriented as analytical studies on the determinants/causes of social assistance programs are relatively under-examined. Second, it identifies a gap in the…
The Dynamics of Welfare State Regime Development in the Global South
The four global worlds of welfare capitalism
What welfare state regimes are observed when the analysis is extended globally, empirically and theoretically? We introduce a novel perspective into the ‘welfare state regimes analyses’ – a perspective that brings developed and developing countries together and, as such, broadens the geographical, empirical and theoretical scope of the ‘welfare modelling business’. The expanding welfare regimes literature has suffered from several drawbacks: (i) …
Random Sampling in Corpus Design
What is the most optimal way of creating a gold standard corpus for training a machine learning system that is designed for automatically collecting protest information in a cross-country context? We show that creating a gold standard corpus for training and testing machine learning models on the basis of randomly chosen news articles from news archives yields better performance than selecting news articles on the basis of keyword filtering, whic…
Contentious welfare
The period since the 1990s has witnessed the expanding political influence of the Kurdish movement across the country as well as a transformation in the welfare system, manifesting itself mainly in the emergence of extensive social assistance programs. While Turkish social assistance policy has been formally neutral regarding who is entitled to state aid, Kurds have been de facto singled out by these new welfare programs, as is shown by existing …
The politics of social assistance in South Africa
Since the 1990s, South Africa, like many other countries from the Global South, has provided extensive social assistance for the poor. The literature on these policies, however, is largely dominated by structuralist accounts, and it largely overlooks political factors. We conducted quantitative analyses regarding the South African flagship Child Support Grant (CSG) program and investigated how contentious and electoral political dynamics jointly …
The World Bank and the Contentious Politics of Global Social Spending
There has recently been a surge in public social spending in emerging market economiesEmerging market economies (EMEs). We hypothesize that social unrest is a key “political” factor that drives this expansion, translating “structural” pressures into social expenditures. We test this hypothesis on a panel dataset of 48 countries between the years 1989 and 2015. Our results indicate that social unrest has a strong positive effect on social expendit…
Thirty years of the Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism
In the 30 or so years since the publication of Gosta Esping‐Andersenapos;s Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism a number of rival welfare state typologies have emerged. This article has two broad aims. First, we review the reviews of welfare state typologies, pointing to issues of often unclear case selection and a wide range of concepts, variables, and methods, resulting in a variety of worlds of welfare and their constituent nations. We show that…
Electoral Polarization, Class Politics and a New Welfare State in Brazil and Turkey
We explain why and how the governing parties, AKP of Turkey and PT of Brazil, converged on the same path of relying on the poor as the main strategy to stay in power. With the neoliberal reorganization and internationalization of their economies, the capacity of these governments to set up developmentalist alliances with big capital, the middle classes and the organized working classes was weakened. Based on a most-different-systems design and on…
Indigenous unrest and the contentious politics of social assistance in Mexico
The Variable Selection Problem in the Three Worlds of Welfare Literature
Governing ethnic unrest
How can we explain the mass appeal and electoral success of Islamist political parties? What are the underlying sources of the Islamist political advantage? Scholars have provided numerous answers to these widely debated questions, variously emphasizing the religious nature of the discourses in Islamist movements, their ideological hegemony, organizational capacity, provision of social services, reputation, and structural factors. However, one ke…
Straddling two continents and beyond three worlds? The case of Turkey’s welfare regime
This article aims to consider how Turkey has been classified in the welfare regime literature, and on what basis it has been classified. This will then form the basis for exploring whether there appears to be any variation between approaches and methods and/or between the “position” (e.g., location or language) of the authors. Studies of Turkey’s welfare regime exhibit a significant degree of variation in terms of both approaches and conclusions,…
The World Bank's social assistance recommendations for developing and transition countries
This article presents a political-sociological analysis of the World Bank's social assistance programmes in developing and transition countries. It builds on the argument that political objectives have played a critical role for the Bank in shaping these policies, including the prevention and containment of social unrest as well as mobilization of popular support. The article presents empirical evidence based on an analysis of 447 World Bank poli…
Class and Politics in Turkey’s Gezi Protests
What social forces have been mobilized in the mass protests of recent years? Following Göran Therborn and André Singer’s contributions in NLR 85, Erdem Yörük and Murat Yüksel examine the class backgrounds and political ideologies of the Gezi Park protesters, finding that manual workers outnumbered ‘new middle classes’
The Long Summer of Turkey
This article provides the trajectory of the political and social conditions that structured the sudden and puzzling explosion of the nationwide Gezi revolt in Turkey out of a small protest for an urban park in Istanbul during the summer of 2013. It depicts the macro-level political struggles that shaped the last decade in Turkey as well as the short history of grassroots political activism during the year preceding the Gezi revolt. In explaining …
O longo verão da Turquia
Este artigo descreve as causas políticas e sociais dos protestos do parque Gezi na Turquia, apresentando um esboço da história recente do país. O artigo analisa o desdobramento de queixas acumuladas e das lutas populares resultantes na Turquia durante o ano anterior aos protestos. Em seguida, o artigo emprega o conceito de profecia autorrealizável como um mecanismo que transformou e uniu várias lutas em um único levante de âmbito nacional. A segu…
Shifting forms of Turkish state paternalism toward the Kurds
Welfare Provision as Political Containment
Can we argue that pressures generated from grassroots politics are responsible for the rapid expansion and ethnically/racially uneven distribution of social assistance programs in emerging economies? This article analyzes the Turkish case and shows that social assistance programs in Turkey are directed disproportionately to the Kurdish minority and to the Kurdish region of Turkey, especially to the internally displaced Kurds in urban and metropol…
Welfare Provision as Political Containment
Can we argue that pressures generated from grassroots politics are responsible for the rapid expansion and ethnically/racially uneven distribution of social assistance programs in emerging economies? This article analyzes the Turkish case and shows that social assistance programs in Turkey are directed disproportionately to the Kurdish minority and to the Kurdish region of Turkey, especially to the internally displaced Kurds in urban and metropol…
The Variable Selection Problem in the Three Worlds of Welfare Literature
Governing ethnic unrest
How can we explain the mass appeal and electoral success of Islamist political parties? What are the underlying sources of the Islamist political advantage? Scholars have provided numerous answers to these widely debated questions, variously emphasizing the religious nature of the discourses in Islamist movements, their ideological hegemony, organizational capacity, provision of social services, reputation, and structural factors. However, one ke…
The Long Summer of Turkey
This article provides the trajectory of the political and social conditions that structured the sudden and puzzling explosion of the nationwide Gezi revolt in Turkey out of a small protest for an urban park in Istanbul during the summer of 2013. It depicts the macro-level political struggles that shaped the last decade in Turkey as well as the short history of grassroots political activism during the year preceding the Gezi revolt. In explaining …
Indigenous unrest and the contentious politics of social assistance in Mexico
Straddling two continents and beyond three worlds? The case of Turkey’s welfare regime
This article aims to consider how Turkey has been classified in the welfare regime literature, and on what basis it has been classified. This will then form the basis for exploring whether there appears to be any variation between approaches and methods and/or between the “position” (e.g., location or language) of the authors. Studies of Turkey’s welfare regime exhibit a significant degree of variation in terms of both approaches and conclusions,…
Shifting forms of Turkish state paternalism toward the Kurds
The four global worlds of welfare capitalism
What welfare state regimes are observed when the analysis is extended globally, empirically and theoretically? We introduce a novel perspective into the ‘welfare state regimes analyses’ – a perspective that brings developed and developing countries together and, as such, broadens the geographical, empirical and theoretical scope of the ‘welfare modelling business’. The expanding welfare regimes literature has suffered from several drawbacks: (i) …
Contentious welfare
The period since the 1990s has witnessed the expanding political influence of the Kurdish movement across the country as well as a transformation in the welfare system, manifesting itself mainly in the emergence of extensive social assistance programs. While Turkish social assistance policy has been formally neutral regarding who is entitled to state aid, Kurds have been de facto singled out by these new welfare programs, as is shown by existing …
Political Determinants of Social Assistance Policies
Social assistance programs and the related literature are proliferating globally. This article conducts a critical systematic review of the literature with objective and transparent selection criteria and illustrates two major shortcomings: First, the literature is largely descriptive and impact-oriented as analytical studies on the determinants/causes of social assistance programs are relatively under-examined. Second, it identifies a gap in the…
The politics of social assistance in South Africa
Since the 1990s, South Africa, like many other countries from the Global South, has provided extensive social assistance for the poor. The literature on these policies, however, is largely dominated by structuralist accounts, and it largely overlooks political factors. We conducted quantitative analyses regarding the South African flagship Child Support Grant (CSG) program and investigated how contentious and electoral political dynamics jointly …
Electoral Polarization, Class Politics and a New Welfare State in Brazil and Turkey
We explain why and how the governing parties, AKP of Turkey and PT of Brazil, converged on the same path of relying on the poor as the main strategy to stay in power. With the neoliberal reorganization and internationalization of their economies, the capacity of these governments to set up developmentalist alliances with big capital, the middle classes and the organized working classes was weakened. Based on a most-different-systems design and on…
The World Bank's social assistance recommendations for developing and transition countries
This article presents a political-sociological analysis of the World Bank's social assistance programmes in developing and transition countries. It builds on the argument that political objectives have played a critical role for the Bank in shaping these policies, including the prevention and containment of social unrest as well as mobilization of popular support. The article presents empirical evidence based on an analysis of 447 World Bank poli…
Welfare Provision as Political Containment
Can we argue that pressures generated from grassroots politics are responsible for the rapid expansion and ethnically/racially uneven distribution of social assistance programs in emerging economies? This article analyzes the Turkish case and shows that social assistance programs in Turkey are directed disproportionately to the Kurdish minority and to the Kurdish region of Turkey, especially to the internally displaced Kurds in urban and metropol…
O longo verão da Turquia
Este artigo descreve as causas políticas e sociais dos protestos do parque Gezi na Turquia, apresentando um esboço da história recente do país. O artigo analisa o desdobramento de queixas acumuladas e das lutas populares resultantes na Turquia durante o ano anterior aos protestos. Em seguida, o artigo emprega o conceito de profecia autorrealizável como um mecanismo que transformou e uniu várias lutas em um único levante de âmbito nacional. A segu…
Shifting forms of Turkish state paternalism toward the Kurds
Class and Politics in Turkey’s Gezi Protests
What social forces have been mobilized in the mass protests of recent years? Following Göran Therborn and André Singer’s contributions in NLR 85, Erdem Yörük and Murat Yüksel examine the class backgrounds and political ideologies of the Gezi Park protesters, finding that manual workers outnumbered ‘new middle classes’
The Long Summer of Turkey
This article provides the trajectory of the political and social conditions that structured the sudden and puzzling explosion of the nationwide Gezi revolt in Turkey out of a small protest for an urban park in Istanbul during the summer of 2013. It depicts the macro-level political struggles that shaped the last decade in Turkey as well as the short history of grassroots political activism during the year preceding the Gezi revolt. In explaining …
Straddling two continents and beyond three worlds? The case of Turkey’s welfare regime
This article aims to consider how Turkey has been classified in the welfare regime literature, and on what basis it has been classified. This will then form the basis for exploring whether there appears to be any variation between approaches and methods and/or between the “position” (e.g., location or language) of the authors. Studies of Turkey’s welfare regime exhibit a significant degree of variation in terms of both approaches and conclusions,…
The World Bank's social assistance recommendations for developing and transition countries
This article presents a political-sociological analysis of the World Bank's social assistance programmes in developing and transition countries. It builds on the argument that political objectives have played a critical role for the Bank in shaping these policies, including the prevention and containment of social unrest as well as mobilization of popular support. The article presents empirical evidence based on an analysis of 447 World Bank poli…
Indigenous unrest and the contentious politics of social assistance in Mexico
The Variable Selection Problem in the Three Worlds of Welfare Literature
Governing ethnic unrest
How can we explain the mass appeal and electoral success of Islamist political parties? What are the underlying sources of the Islamist political advantage? Scholars have provided numerous answers to these widely debated questions, variously emphasizing the religious nature of the discourses in Islamist movements, their ideological hegemony, organizational capacity, provision of social services, reputation, and structural factors. However, one ke…
The World Bank and the Contentious Politics of Global Social Spending
There has recently been a surge in public social spending in emerging market economiesEmerging market economies (EMEs). We hypothesize that social unrest is a key “political” factor that drives this expansion, translating “structural” pressures into social expenditures. We test this hypothesis on a panel dataset of 48 countries between the years 1989 and 2015. Our results indicate that social unrest has a strong positive effect on social expendit…
Thirty years of the Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism
In the 30 or so years since the publication of Gosta Esping‐Andersenapos;s Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism a number of rival welfare state typologies have emerged. This article has two broad aims. First, we review the reviews of welfare state typologies, pointing to issues of often unclear case selection and a wide range of concepts, variables, and methods, resulting in a variety of worlds of welfare and their constituent nations. We show that…
Electoral Polarization, Class Politics and a New Welfare State in Brazil and Turkey
We explain why and how the governing parties, AKP of Turkey and PT of Brazil, converged on the same path of relying on the poor as the main strategy to stay in power. With the neoliberal reorganization and internationalization of their economies, the capacity of these governments to set up developmentalist alliances with big capital, the middle classes and the organized working classes was weakened. Based on a most-different-systems design and on…
Contentious welfare
The period since the 1990s has witnessed the expanding political influence of the Kurdish movement across the country as well as a transformation in the welfare system, manifesting itself mainly in the emergence of extensive social assistance programs. While Turkish social assistance policy has been formally neutral regarding who is entitled to state aid, Kurds have been de facto singled out by these new welfare programs, as is shown by existing …
The politics of social assistance in South Africa
Since the 1990s, South Africa, like many other countries from the Global South, has provided extensive social assistance for the poor. The literature on these policies, however, is largely dominated by structuralist accounts, and it largely overlooks political factors. We conducted quantitative analyses regarding the South African flagship Child Support Grant (CSG) program and investigated how contentious and electoral political dynamics jointly …
The Politics of the Welfare State in Turkey
In The Politics of the Welfare State in Turkey, author Erdem Yörük provides a politics-based explanation for the post-1980 transformation of the Turkish welfare system, in which poor relief policies have replaced employment-based social security. This book is one of the results of Yörük's European Research Council-funded project, which compares the political dynamics in several emerging markets in order to develop a new political theory of welfar…
The squeaky wheel gets the grease
What are the contemporary determinates of social assistance provision? What is the role of contentious politics? Social assistance literature is dominated by economic and demographic accounts, which under-examine the possibility that governments extend social assistance to contain social unrest. We test factors associated with these "structuralist" and "political" theories on a new panel dataset which includes 54 OECD and emerging market countrie…
Political Determinants of Social Assistance Policies
Social assistance programs and the related literature are proliferating globally. This article conducts a critical systematic review of the literature with objective and transparent selection criteria and illustrates two major shortcomings: First, the literature is largely descriptive and impact-oriented as analytical studies on the determinants/causes of social assistance programs are relatively under-examined. Second, it identifies a gap in the…
The Dynamics of Welfare State Regime Development in the Global South
The four global worlds of welfare capitalism
What welfare state regimes are observed when the analysis is extended globally, empirically and theoretically? We introduce a novel perspective into the ‘welfare state regimes analyses’ – a perspective that brings developed and developing countries together and, as such, broadens the geographical, empirical and theoretical scope of the ‘welfare modelling business’. The expanding welfare regimes literature has suffered from several drawbacks: (i) …
Random Sampling in Corpus Design
What is the most optimal way of creating a gold standard corpus for training a machine learning system that is designed for automatically collecting protest information in a cross-country context? We show that creating a gold standard corpus for training and testing machine learning models on the basis of randomly chosen news articles from news archives yields better performance than selecting news articles on the basis of keyword filtering, whic…
Does violent conflict affect the distribution of social welfare? Evidence from India's Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act
What are the contentious political dynamics of the largest workfare program in the world, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) of India? Combining quantitative analysis with a close reading of government documents and a survey of the existing literature, we suggest that the Indian government's counter‐insurgency strategy against the Maoist unrest is a significant dynamic shaping the distribution of MGNREGA benefits…
A Computational Analysis of Ideological Positions, Emotional Stance, and Support for Presidential Candidates in Turkey
Using artificial intelligence, this article explores the intricate dynamics between ideologies, emotions, and political preferences of the electorate in Turkey. Utilizing a dataset of one billion posts from X (formerly Twitter), the study maps out political opinions, focusing on support for presidential candidates, ideological stances, and collective emotions around the pivotal 2023 Turkish presidential elections. We discuss the limitations of co…
AI and the party
This Research Note explores the emerging intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and party politics by applying Katz and Mair’s “three faces” framework to analyze the role of AI in reshaping party organization. While AI is not yet uniformly transforming parties, its growing use in campaigning, policymaking, membership engagement, and internal management introduces new dynamics of centralisation, personalisation, and automation. The note high…
Online gendered violence and visibility in electoral autocracies
Online platforms have become indispensable tools for political candidates to gain visibility, particularly for female candidates in electoral autocracies who often lack access to traditional networks, party hierarchies, and media platforms. We argue that online visibility, while a resource for female candidates, disproportionately exposes them to online violence that functions as a mechanism of political control, reinforcing patriarchal exclusion…
Political science (20 works) · Politics (19 works) · Law (17 works) · Economics (15 works) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (13 works) · Law (11 works) · Sociology (11 works) · Political economy (10 works) · Turkey's Politics and Society (9 works) · Welfare (9 works)