PRIVATIZATION AND DEMOCRATIZATION: A Comparative Perspective on Argentina and Turkey of the 1980s.

Argentina and Turkey are two countries with different historical, cultural and institutional attributes. They are however both examples of new democratic regimes that emerged in the mid-1980s amid economic crisis . They are also two newly emerging markets with middle-income status, which switched to free market economics in the 1980s with accelerating privatization programs in the 1990s. Both of the governments applying these privatization plans have been populist in nature but technocratic and neoliberal in credentials. The initiators of economic reform programs, Ozal and Menem, both used effective coalition-making strategies with strongly clientelistic tones giving rise to rampant corruption. Privatizations, in both cases, were used as effective tools to bring about these outcomes while simultaneously shaping them as they emerged. The cases of Argentina and Turkey pose an interesting puzzle in terms of convergent effects of privatizations on democratization and its corollaries. This study argues that comparable patterns can be observed in the concentration of power, in the executive regardless of the parliamentary versus presidentialist regime divide, in the reaction patterns of labor unions and their development inthe neoliberal era, ispread of patronage links and corruption, and finally, in the fluctation of economic development in the two countries. These and other similar developments are then related to the privatization policies and their implementation. Further research should look at more detail in the direct relationship between privatizations, their implementation and consequences on workers and labor unions, party structures and civil society to determine if similar patterns exist as well in these features of democratization and examine why. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]