The determinants of agricultural policy in modern Turkey: A comparative perspective

This dissertation identifies the variations of governmental priorities towards agriculture--a proxy for general agricultural policies. In the first part, aggregate cross-national data of 34 developing countries for the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s are analyzed. In the second part, aggregate time-series data are studied for Turkey, a deviant case with her relatively favorable resources and continual (but not continuous) democratization process.;The major finding is that a clear-cut separation between agricultural and industrial, and between public and private sectors have become more difficult over the years. Policy priorities can no longer be determined as if sectors are exclusive since an industrial base is necessary for diversified agricultural production and supportive agricultural policies. With the increased internationalization of agriculture after a mild recession in the mid-1970s and a stronger one in the early 1980s, governments have become more responsive to structural problems of integration into the world market (e.g., sectoral imbalance and dependency).;The results of longitudinal analysis of Turkish data for 37 years also suggest that coping with the problems of industrialization and internationalization of agriculture are simultaneous processes. While political exigencies have always affected agricultural policies, from the 1980s shifts in priorities after coups and after elections no longer appear to cancel each other out. Hence, a plethora of policy questions has been addressed in the light of the changing role of agriculture, and of states in agriculture over time.;Prior research which employs farmers as units of analysis urged the researcher to state explicitly the assumptions of her methodology and assess its restrictions. One can conclude that organization-based analyses at macro level are more prone to explicate the temporal and spatial regularities of agriculture than crop-based ones at micro level.;Instead of a micro level decision-making approach, I have sought the causal antecedents of agricultural policies from the perspective of structural impediments. The three "sides" of the triangular model--of sectoral, national, and international issues--are such that each level has its own policy problems the culmination of which results in the determination of agricultural policy. I have employed path analytical techniques to distinguish the patterns that these layers of hierarchy impose upon spending priorities towards agriculture.