| This research emerged from the belief that merely economic explanations of rent seeking were too narrow and an interdisciplinary approach was needed to understand historical structural factors that contribute to particularistic exchanges. Rent-seeking and particularistic ties are almost always explained from a strictly neoclassical perspective which tend to be reductionist approaches that fail to explain why some states will be rent-seeking while others will not. Moreover, other frameworks that analyze state-civil society interaction do so without taking into account particularistic state-civil society interaction. Thus, there is a need to explain such particularistic ties in a comparative institutional framework. My dissertation research was undertaken on two associations in Turkey, namely the Turkish Red Crescent (Kizilay) and AKUT (a search and rescue team), in order to understand the dynamics of the relationship between a particularistic state and civil society associations. The TRC was chosen because it was involved in particularistic exchanges and functioned as an institution of the state, which meant that it partook in the state failure the state in Turkey faced in the aftermath of a devastating earthquake in 1999. The Marmara earthquake was devastating not only physically in terms of the damage it caused, but also socially in terms of the extent of the failure of state institutions it exposed and the extent of criticisms it unleashed. The immediate chaos that ensued in the aftermath of the earthquake was marked by the "absence of the state". The failure of the state provoked an unprecedented civil reaction and mobilization. AKUT, the second case of the research, also became the focus of public attention, albeit for completely the opposite reason. It was revered for the successful rescue work it carried out in the earthquake while the TRC was severely criticized for its failure to deliver services.; My dissertation research has shown that in cases of state failure, the state can only establish particularistic ties creating a multilevel chain system of particularized exchanges and fails to deliver public goods and services universally. Thus, the state co-opts a civil society organization into this chain system, demonstrated both by the TRC and AKUT. Furthermore, in cases of state failure, a civil society organization that has developed independently of the state becomes over-missionized with filling the gap created by state failure (AKUT), with public expectations and demands from AKUT far exceeding their self-defined goals and capabilities. Thus, ineffectiveness of the state does not translate into well-working civil society organizations. The absence of a capable state affects the nature of civil society organizations adversely. This finding is a direct contribution to the more general debate on the effectiveness of state institutions and the voluntary sector. More importantly, my research effectively shows that much of the dichotomous discussion of the state on the one hand, and civil society on the other, needs to be discarded. Such dichotomous thinking does not capture the complex interactions between the state and civil society organizations, as I have shown in the case of Turkey. |
