Abstract:

The coup attempt staged on 15 July 2016 in Turkey raised two fundamental questions. First, how a religious organization achieved to seize the public positions in public organizations including Turkish Armed Forces, which led them to control those public organizations? Second, what can be done to prevent such kind of other groups to destroy the neutrality of the state and drag the political system into instability? There might be many answers to these questions from different social disciplines but the group theory of Olson is used here to answer these questions. Olson, who put the economic analysis into the center of the collective action problem, indicates that there are two requirements for the large groups, such as FETO, to be organized. First one is the creating selective incentives and the other one is the compulsory membership. FETO, on the one hand, created economic rents as selective incentives for their members, on the other hand, used coercive power of the public organizations to force other individuals and groups to join or to cooperate with them. Thus, the present state of the Turkish political system provides great opportunities to organized groups to exploit large and rich public resources. Therefore, the political struggles in Turkey have been turned into struggle for distribution of the economic rents, which, in return, undermines the political pluralism in Turkey. Within this context, it is claimed here that, depending solely on cultural/sociological explanations to understand the participation problems of the religious or secular groups into democratic politics in Turkey is not enough

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