Neo-Populist Polarization and Boundary-Making: The Clash of Democratization versus New Authoritarianism

Organized by the Department of International Relations, the Politics and Society workshop will host Dr. Murat Somer from Koc University. The workshop will be held on Wednesday, May 17th between 13:00-14:30 at FEAS/AB2 345 and is open to the public. The language of the workshop is English. 

Based on recent empirical and theoretical publications and a book manuscript in progress, this talk will discuss the causes and dynamics of what it will call “neo-populist polarization.” It will then conceptualize new authoritarianism as a hybrid regime and a possible consequence of neo-populist polarization. The presentation will argue that neo-populist polarization is a particular style of politics aimed at redistributing power and resources from one societal segment to another and it will discuss the conditions under which it can produce either democratization or autocratization. Two polar outcomes will be conceptualized as the persistence of “old authoritarianism” and the consolidation of “new authoritarianism.” It will be maintained that in different forms and levels new authoritarianism is becoming increasingly common in the world, among other reasons because of developments in political economy, media and political culture in recent decades. The presentation will then outline six different possible outcomes of neo-populist polarization and discuss representative cases.

Murat Somer is Associate Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Koç University, and an associate of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. His research on democratization, polarization, ethnic conflicts, religious and secular politics, political Islam, and the Kurdish question have been published in books, book volumes and journals such as Comparative Political Studies, Democratization and Third World Quarterly. Somer holds a BA from Boğaziçi University in Istanbul and an MA and a PhD from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Among other visiting positions, he was a Mellon post-doctoral fellow at the University of Washington, Seattle, a Democracy and Development Fellow at Princeton University, and a Senior Visiting Scholar at Stockholm University. He won awards such as a Sabancı-Brookings International Research Award in 2009 and the Sedat Simavi Social Sciences Prize in 2015.