| The dissertation aims to understand the political basis behind the initiation and longevity of the process of financialization of the Turkish economy in the post-1980 period. While some of the existing literature focuses on the role of states in initiating the process of financialization (rather than seeing it as an automatic outcome produced by market forces), most of these studies have focused on the United States. This dissertation contributes to the literature on financialization and the state by looking at the process from the South, through a case study of Turkey.;The dissertation illuminates aspects of the process of financialization that have been underemphasized in existing accounts of the post-1980 economic transformations in Turkey. One of the key findings of the dissertation is that policymakers repeatedly turned to monetary policies as a solution when they found it difficult to adopt fiscal policies with serious distributional consequences---that is, policies that would have required explicit political debate and compromise. Moreover, whereas the existing literature has repeatedly emphasized that politicians tend to spend extravagantly to increase their popularity (thus accounting for the problems policy-makers face in controlling fiscal deficits), this study finds that politicians chose to deregulate and liberalize (and promote financialization) the Turkish economy with very similar motivations.;The evidence for this dissertation was collected from various archives including those of the World Bank, IMF and the most widely circulating daily newspaper in Turkey, Hurriyet, as well as secondary sources. Open-ended interviews with high-level Turkish bureaucrats were also conducted. |
