Tolga Bölükbasi
Research assistant: Cansu Erdogan
Funded by the Stiftung Mercator (1 January 2017 – 31 December 2019) Social security systems and welfare states are key institutions of Western post-war societies, shaping basic social structures like labour markets, socio-economic inequality, gender, and the relationship between state, markets and civil society. Social policy is about fundamental normative understandings of society, constituting a social contract and underpinning social cohesion. The project brings together leading social policy researchers from Germany and Turkey in order to locate Turkey’s experience in the field of social security in the broader world of welfare states. It employs state-of-the-art theories and different research methods to trace specific social policies and their political and ideational backgrounds in four key areas of social security: pensions, health, unemployment and social assistance. Finally, the project depicts the overall shape of the Turkish welfare state and explains its rise. Outside academia, the project aims to contribute to a better understanding of Turkey's society, economy and politics in Germany. Although the country has been a self-declared welfare state ever since 1961, and spends more than a third of all government expenditure on social provisions, popular imagination would not normally associate Turkey with welfare statism. But besides political and civil rights, the state of social rights in Turkey, too, is a crucial factor for the relationship between Turkey and Europe. Can Turkey relate to the European family of welfare states and to “social Europe”?
