DEMOCRACY IN TURKEY IN THE CONTEXT OF AREND LIPJART CRITERIA

The importance attached to democracy and democratic values by either the governments and international organizations or the non-governmental organizations is indisputable in this century. The citizens make their voices heard, and they may participate in the governmental and political life more actively. The way to reach a contemporary democratic order is related to the domination of law on political life and the reflection of the will of the voters to the state government. The extent of democratization is a matter of prestige for countries, and the international system of promoting the quality of their democracies to the world highlights these countries. In the measurement and evaluation of this quality, political scientists use certain criteria for the scoring and evaluations, by which countries can be evaluated comparatively. One of the most noteworthy of these comparative analyses is Lijphart's analysis. In this study, an evaluation on Turkey is carried out by the Lijphart's criteria he used while writing his world famous “Patterns of Democracy Government Forms &Performance in ThirtySix Countries,” one of the most important works on democracy