Anti-corruption policy in Turkey instruments, issues and influences

Corruption is an entrenched and enduring problem in Turkey. While political and popular discussions about fraudulent acts in politics and public administration have been intensified in recent months, 'anticorruption as a public policy' has not yet attracted enough attention from the scholarly community. This current paper can thus be construed as one of the initial attempts toward framing anti-corruption as a complex public policy problem in Turkey dwelling on the interplay of instruments, issues, and influences to better capture the national context and constraints facing the present and future anti-corruption efforts. After briefly describing the significance of studying anti-corruption as a complex public policy problem in a globalized world, the first section of this paper informs the reader about the research methodology utilized. The interview component of our field study involved 55 face-to-face interviews with a group of 60 highly-educated and well-experienced 'experts', including academicians, inspectors, journalists, activists, and politicians. The main thematic section further describes and discusses key policy instruments pertaining to anti-corruption policies, namely government programmes of AKP cabinets and the 'strategy for increasing transparency and strengthening the struggle against corruption'. This contribution then debates major issues related to identifying and getting corruption onto the agenda as a public problem by taking findings from our field research in consideration. Finally, this essay takes into account the influences of the EU and other international actors in determining anti-corruption policies and practices in Turkey along with the relevant findings from the interview component of our field research. The paper then ends with a brief concluding section.