Browsing by Author "Apaydin, Fulya"

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Authoritarian Neoliberalism and the Instrumentalization of the Banking Sector in Turkey and Hungary
(SAGE Publications Ltd, 2025) Apaydin, Fulya; Piroska, Dora; Coban, M. Kerem
This paper studies the evolution of the domestic banking sector in Hungary and Turkey where Viktor Orban and Recep Tayyip Erdogan have intervened to politically control credit allocation. We argue that both leaders have instrumentalized the banking sector to serve their political needs rather than following a developmentalist agenda under authoritarian neoliberalism. This occurred through two distinct patterns following the 2008 Global Financial Crisis in an attempt to ensure their political survival: while Orban intervened in the banking sector to secure partisan access to consumption, Erdogan did so to ensure partisan business access to cheap credit. These policy preferences reveal additional components of an autocrat's toolkit for political survival, which are strongly influenced by the constellation of dominant social bloc interests and the relative position of their national economies within the overall global financial hierarchy.
Citation - WoS: 2
Citation - Scopus: 3
Navigating Financial Cycles: Economic Growth, Bureaucratic Autonomy, and Regulatory Governance in Emerging Markets
(Wiley, 2024) Coban, M. Kerem; Apaydin, Fulya
Political decisions over economic growth policies influence the degree of bureaucratic autonomy and regulatory governance dynamics. Yet, our understanding of these processes in the Global South is somewhat limited. The article studies the post-Global Financial Crisis period and relies on elite interviews and secondary sources from Turkey. It problematizes how an economic growth model dependent on foreign capital inflows, which are contingent on global financial cycles, influences the trajectory of bureaucratic autonomy. Specifically, we argue that dependence on foreign capital flows for economic growth creates an unstable macroeconomic policy environment: while the expansionary episode of the global financial cycle masks conflicts between the incumbent and bureaucracy, the contractionary episode threatens the political survival of the incumbent. In the case of Turkey, this has incentivized the ruling coalition to resort to executive aggrandizement to control monetary policy and banking regulation, which resulted in a dramatic decay of the autonomy of the regulatory agencies since 2013.
Citation - WoS: 24
Citation - Scopus: 29
The Political Consequences of Dependent Financialization: Capital Flows, Crisis and the Authoritarian Turn in Turkey
(Routledge Journals, Taylor & Francis Ltd, 2023) Apaydin, Fulya; Coban, Mehmet Kerem
Recent debates on financialization in emerging market economies highlight the terms of unequal exchange that they are embedded in, where international capital flows steered by powerful financial actors and transnationalized banks have a major impact on economic growth performance. As a result, many of the small open economies in the Global South have become increasingly sensitive to international market volatilities, as the post-2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC) episode has shown. Yet, we know much less about the political implications of these interactions. How do unequal financial relations influence political trajectories in emerging market economies? Using process tracing and based on original evidence from Turkey, we find that when GDP growth is dependent on financial inflows under a credit-led growth model, the constraints on the domestic policy space following an economic crisis allowed the ruling party to instrumentalize monetary and regulatory institutions as financial agents of political repression.