NOTES FROM AN AMERICAN POLITICAL THOUGHT PROGRAM FOR TURKEY’S POLITICAL FUTURE
NOTES FROM AN AMERICAN POLITICAL THOUGHT PROGRAM FOR TURKEY’S POLITICAL FUTURE

Summary/Abstract: In 2015, the author attended a six weeks summer school on the American Political Thought in Massachusetts, US. Throughout the program, major currents in US political thought from the colonial period to the present were examined. Participants explored the shaping of American identity and the interplay between that identity and US history and politics. As a political scientist from Turkey, it was a timely introduction to the democratic founding of the US and to the discussions on race, religion, immigration, gender, and civil rights, as essential to understand the development of American political thought. This paper offers insights from a centuries-long tradition of presidential system for Turkish political elite and decision makers who have been debating the nature of a prospective presidential system. Despite the differences in historical, political and social conjunctures, it is noteworthy to review how a system of ordered liberty founded in the eighteenth century has survived through two centuries of social and political change and how that system is functioning today. This review will provide insights for Turkey to engineer its own presidential system. The overall paper consists of topical blog entries designed to offer insights from one particular American political thought program for the development of a presidential system in Turkey.

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