Summary: Acknowledging the scarcity of research on the discipline of political science in Turkey, this chapter presents a historical overview and a detailed depiction of present state of Turkish political science starting from 2000. Late Ottoman and early republican heritage of political science in Turkey is largely dominated by education in law, especially in constitutional law. Since 1960s, individual departments of political science started to emerge. After the introduction of a central administrative overseeing body, the YÖK, or Board of Higher Education, in 1981, political science education began to be delivered more regularly within several different departments such as public administration, international relations, European Union, political science and international relations. The rise of the number of departments required a larger political science community and the student body steadily grew. The chapter provides time-series data on these developments and interprets them. In addition, one can find data and a discussion on gender dimension of political science community, i.e. undergraduate and graduate students as well as faculty members, in the 2000s.
In a paper presented at the XXIInd World Congress of the International Political Science Association in Madrid (2012), Erkki Berndtson surveyed the complex situation of political science in Europe in a comparative fashion. He drew up an interesting set of regional alignments where several common characteristics of political science converge. In the context of Europe, he talked about North European, Central European, South European, and East European approaches where Turkey is located within the South European approach to political science along with France, Spain, Greece, Italy, and a few other nations. Despite showing common South European regional trends, Turkish political science, Berndtson suggests, diverges from French legalistic roots due to American influence (Berndtson, 2012, p. 10). In the first part of this chapter, I would like to see to what extent this observation is valid. Hence, the first part will be an historical survey of Turkish political science from its earliest roots onwards. In the second part, I will focus on a more current vision of the discipline in Turkey and focus on the period from 2000 to 2013.