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emerged in the mid-1980s amid economic crisis and of newly emerging markets with
middle-income status. They both have 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, have both
used effective coalition-making strategies with clientelistic tones giving rise to increased
corruption. Privatizations were used as effective tools to bring about these outcomes and
shaping them as they emerged.
While the space of this paper does not allow analysis of the recent parallel
developments in the development of their civil society, the reigning corruption at the state
and societal level and the party system structure and party discipline, the cases of
Argentina and Turkey pose an interesting puzzle in terms of convergent effects of
privatizations on democratization and its corollaries. This study has established that
comparable patterns in executive concentration of power, reaction patterns of labor
unions, increasing patronage and corruption links and the fluctation of economic
development in the two countries 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 establish the similar patterns and
examine why.
Convention