Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

Erdogan Will Need to Liberalize Turkey to Survive

The increasingly authoritarian president knows that the failed coup had underlying causes that won't go away.

July 22, 2016 at 6:00 AM UTC

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

This won't fix it.
Photographer: Sakis Mitrolidis/AFP/Getty Images

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President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey seems to be taking increasingly extreme measures in reaction to the thwarted coup last weekend. Yet Turkey may be forced to democratize following the attempted military takeover and Erdogan's purges. Coups, both successful and failed, have been shown to increase the likelihood of democratization in authoritarian countries.

Research by Clayton Thyne of the University of Kentucky and Jonathan Powell of the University of Central Florida showed that in countries where coups have been successful, "leaders have incentives to democratize quickly in order to establish political legitimacy and economic growth." And in countries such as Turkey that have experienced failed coups, these events are "credible signals that leaders must enact meaningful reforms to remain in power."