Keywords

Why begin a book whose empirical studies focus on a very specific type of policy—cash transfer programs aimed at helping very low income households in Turkey meet basic needs—with a discussion of citizenship? The most fundamental reason is that policy never exists in isolation. As noted a generation ago by Hugh Heclo (1974/2010: 4), “Policy acquires meaning because an observer perceives and interprets a course of action amid the confusion of a complex world.” The existence of economic support policies is premised on a broader shared understanding. The answer to specific questions: How—if at all—should assistance be extended to those who cannot provide for the basic needs of themselves and their families? Who—if anyone—should provide this assistance? depends on the answer to much more general questions: What kind of society do we aspire to live in? Who is a member of that society? What does membership entail? A central premise of this book is that answers to these questions are neither self-evident nor universal; they are specific as to time and place. To give meaning to contemporary cash transfer (CT) programs in Turkey, accordingly, requires several dimensions of contextualization. In this introduction, we focus on the broadest of these, the notion of citizenship regimes as a source of answers to questions about the scope and content of social membership.

1 What Does It Mean To Be a Citizen?

The literature on citizenship provides a rich starting point for considering questions relating to the limits and content of membership. In the simplest form of the concept, citizenship is a status—“legal recognition both domestic and international, that one is a member, native born or naturalized, of a state” (Shklar 1991)—that one does or does not have. The various strands of the citizenship literature, however, typically go beyond this restrictive notion to unpack the concept of citizenship into several components. Typically, this involves distinguishing status, on the one hand, from the practical content of that status, on the other hand. Thus, Joppke (2010) suggests that citizenship involves status, identity, and rights. Another variation on this theme is provided by Bartle (2006), who divides citizenship into rights, participation, and belonging. This exercise in unpacking seems necessary because the notion of legal status by itself does not encompass the range of meanings given to citizenship either in academic or in vernacular speech. In ordinary conversation, we often speak not only of citizens, but of “full” citizens or “good” citizens. In English-language usage, the notion of “citizenship” notably extends beyond the relationship between an individual and a national state; Americans in particular speak of being a (good) citizen of one’s local community or of the world (Smyrl 2013).

Even this type of unpacking is not enough. There is not only one way to be a “good” or “full” citizen. The answer to the question, “what does citizenship entail?” can only be understood in the context of a given citizenship regime. The academic debate with which we will engage in the chapters that follow focuses on contemporary “market citizenship,” distinguishing it both from the “industrial citizenship” of the twentieth century and various preindustrial regimes. In making this distinction, it is important to stress from the outset that to speak of citizenship regimes at all is to impose generalizations from the outside. These labels do not correspond to any legal status of citizenship or explicit policy program. They seek rather to bring together features that to a greater or lesser extent became common in North America and Western Europe at particular moments in time. It is in this sense that we speak in terms of citizenship regimes as sets of conceptually coherent but loosely articulated policies. We will consider throughout this book the extent to which these labels are useful as a tool for understanding policy developments in Turkey. For now, we seek to sketch the general outline of the contrasting regimes.

A common feature of the general definitions noted above is a central place for objective rights, on the one hand, and subjective feelings and behaviors (identity, belonging, participation), on the other hand. While the psychological dimensions of identity and belonging are largely beyond the scope of this book, we are very much interested in rights and participation. What should citizens expect from state and society? How do state and society expect them to behave? The link with policy, here, is evident. Whether we see policy instruments as embodying “a bundle of dispositions” encouraging some behaviors rather than others (Majone and Wildavsky 1979) or as organizing a “a specific set of social relations between public authority and its intended audience” (Lascoumes and Le Galès 2004: 13—our translation), they form a clear link between an overall vision of social purpose and a desired behavior. What, then, does this overall vision encompass? In the classic approach of T.H. Marshall (1950), to which we will return throughout this book, it begins with a set of rights, civil, political, and social, that make meaningful participation possible, and are thus logically prior to it. Taken together, these rights are meant to contribute to the “basic equality of membership” that, for Marshall as for many others, is the essence of citizenship. While we will revisit the question of civil and political rights in the specific context of international migration, our focus in this book is on what Marshall called social rights, which he defined as “the whole range of rights from the right to a modicum of economic welfare and security to the right to share to the full in the social heritage and to live the life of a civilized being according to the standards prevailing in the society.” (Marshall 1950: 11) It is important to emphasize that the equality for which Marshall is calling here is not an even distribution of wealth and income. He is arguing, rather, for a society in which the guaranteed minimum is adequate for “civilized life.” It is access to this life, for him, that must be equal for all.

In this identification of “basic equality of membership” not only with legal equality but also with a certain way living, Marshall was far from alone. This belief was at the core of ethical arguments in support of post-1945 welfare states. At a more theoretical level, Rawls’ (1971) vision of liberal equality stressed not only universal civic and political rights but also equal opportunity to acquire socially valued goods—and insisted that preference should be given to redistribution in favor of those at the bottom of the social and economic hierarchy. More recent authors come to similar conclusion. Böhnke (2007) points out that poverty, discrimination, or handicap can be barriers to full citizenship if they bring limited social relation and a lack of social support. With membership comes responsibilities. The legal status of national citizenship, and increasingly of permanent legal residence or “denizenship” (Turner 2016) has always been associated with counterparts such as paying tax, obeying laws, and in many cases performing military service. Even when we go beyond this to consider, as we propose to do here, citizenship as centered on right and membership, Root (2007: 10) argues that meaningful membership involves not only securing one’s own rights but also accepting responsibility for others.

Accepting the proposition that citizenship should be identified with membership in a constituted community, and that this membership in turn requires a measure not just of legal but of economic equality and solidarity, leaves unaddressed the question of ways and means. How is membership to be achieved? For Marshall, it seemed evident that “basic equality of membership” with respect to social and economic status could only be achieved by ensuring the universal provision of not only the physical but also the social necessities of life, removing these from the sphere of market transaction to achieve what he called the “divorce of real and money income.”

Marshall was well aware that this program was at best imperfectly realized at the time of his writing; he proposed it as an aspiration and a challenge. From a similarly aspirational perspective, we propose to approach “market citizenship” as a regime that seeks to employ market-enhancing policy instruments to achieve “basic equality of membership.” It is fair to ask at least two questions in this context: “what does equality mean in practice?’; and ‘membership in what?’

We share with Marshall (1950: 9) the starting point that “equality of membership” may be “consistent with the inequalities of social class.” Equality of membership does not imply a perfectly even distribution of wealth or status. It does imply that no one is systematically and arbitrarily excluded from the opportunity of gaining wealth and status. This, in turn, suggests the answer to our second question. In a market-centered society “equality of membership” rests on the freest possible access to the market, as consumers, producers, and workers. We are very close here to Sen’s (1981: 2) notion of the market as a set of entitlements: the right to the products of one’s trade, production, labor, or inheritance. Restrictions on what one can buy, where one can live, or whether and how one can work are barriers to such access. The challenge for public policy is transforming theoretical rights into actual capacity. As Sen (1981: 161) pithily puts it:

If one doesn’t have much to exchange, one can’t demand very much, and may thus lose out in competition with others whose needs may be a good deal less acute, but whose entitlements are stronger.

Rather than distinguishing real from money income, regimes based on market citizenship propose to ensure money income sufficient to acquire the social as well as physical necessities of life. In the logic of the market model, the ordinary source of income is employment. In cases where work cannot be found or provides inadequate income, the cash-transfer instruments at the empirical heart of this study represent a direct attempt to compensate for this income in a market-compatible manner.

This approach does not imply a diminished role for public authority. Rather, it suggests that state intervention should focus on ensuring adequate purchasing power for citizens. Direct transfer of “stimulus payments” to all citizens, as the US government did in response to the financial crisis of 2008 and again in the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic of 2020 is an extreme but not unrepresentative version of such a policy. The bulk of this book will be devoted to a critical reflection on policies intended to ensure adequate “money income,” which naturally leads to an emphasis on their distinctive features. It is worth emphasizing from the outset, however, that this approach shares with what we might call the Marshallian vision of the welfare state a number of important features.

Both approaches are based on a core of rights, and in particular on the recognition of a right to meaningful economic participation and to a socially appropriate standard of living. In both cases, the starting point is an assertion that persons with inadequate economic means cannot be full citizens (regardless of their formal status or identity), and that it is a central function of public authority to remedy this situation. It would be logically incorrect, thus, to contrast “rights-based” and “market-based” frameworks. What we can contrast are market-limiting and market-enhancing approaches to ensuring economic and social rights. Both approaches involve a selective use of market transactions; neither is absolutist. Marshall’s market-limiting framework leaves a place for a market sector once selected necessities are removed from it. Market-enhancing frameworks leave a place for the nonmarket instruments, such as the provision of money income as a form of public assistance that forms the empirical core of this book. As such, both frameworks must be distinguished from the imaginary extremes of market-less socialism, on the one hand, and state-less libertarian capitalism, on the other hand.

Each framework seeks to encourage the fullest extent of economic participation, and considers participation a key element of membership and a justification for economic intervention. In the Marshallian, or social-democratic, framework intervention takes the form of nonmarket access to a socially necessary minimum level of education, housing, healthcare, etc. In the market-enhancing framework, economic intervention can take the form of ensuring access to a socially necessary minimum level of money income. In both cases, policies of economic support can be justified on the ground that they are necessary elements of social citizenship in, both, the sense of “basic equality of membership” and of meaningful participation. In both frameworks, economic and social rights, and the policy instruments intended to support them are not necessarily coterminous with civil or political rights. Instruments that provide economic support and encourage economic participation can extend to all residents of a constituted group of states such as the European Union (EU), or to migrants to whom civil and political rights are denied.

In an example to which we will devote considerable attention here, the rights extended to migrants, including and especially those outside the usual legal process of voluntary immigration and naturalization, are frequently a topic of intense political conflict. To the extent that inclusion is attempted, however, the approach to social citizenship extended to migrants tends to be patterned on that already in place for those enjoying the civil and political status of citizen. In systems that follow a market-limiting logic of providing basic services such as health or education free at point of service to their own legal residents, the debate typically turns around whether some form of this should be made available to migrants. Likewise, the turn to cash assistance for legal residents naturally suggests a similar approach for migrants.

The policy mix in the early twenty-first century typically contains both market-limiting and market-enhancing elements. There is a clear tendency in the past few decades, nevertheless, to privilege the latter. This observation forms the empirical starting point for this book. We choose Turkey as a setting because it provides examples of recently established CT programs aimed at both citizens and forced migrants.Footnote 1 These are administered by a wide variety of agencies including local and national authorities, international organizations, and nongovernmental and para-statal organizations. This combination of a constant national social and economic context and considerable variation in implementation conditions makes it possible to identify and assess the key variables that mediate the outcomes of the instruments we study.

Based on an extensive meta-study of CT programs worldwide, and basing his definitions as we do on the foundations laid down by T.H. Marshall, Leisering (2019: 320) concludes that “cash transfer reflects a citizenship approach to poverty”—emphasis in the original. While welcoming this as an initial hypothesis, our approach throughout is to treat the compatibility of CT programs and meaningful citizenship regimes as an open question, subject to empirical answers. We also have the temerity to employ Marshall’s core concepts in a way that, were he still with us, he might well not approve. The policies we study purport to accomplish the ends he set out by means other than those he envisaged.

Whether these policies are ideal from the point of view of social theory is not the question we ask; they are the policies we have. While we discuss the perspective of Marxist and other external critics of the market economy, our principal goal is to produce an internal critique of the programs we study, assessing them in terms of the goals and objectives that they put forward for themselves and of the broader market framework of which they are a part. To this end, we seek to distinguish this study from both the critics of market citizenship and the cheerleaders for CT programming by remembering that, beyond the debate over abstract policy instruments, we should not lose sight of the way in which they are constructed and implemented in practice. As we noted above, Majone and Wildavsky (1979) remind us that policy instruments are at best “a bundle of dispositions” encouraging some behaviors rather than others. To this they add that dispositions are not destiny; one can, in a pinch, stir paint with a screwdriver or hammer nails with a shoe. Context matters: it is the focus of this book.

2 From Local Studies to Global Hypotheses

The research that produced this book was conducted as part of several distinct empirical research programs: completed, ongoing, or conducted with a view to proposing future projects. As such, it includes several different approaches, and is based on explicit methodological choices. We begin with a systematic consideration of competing interpretations of the interaction between citizenship regimes and instruments of social assistance (Chap. 2), and then discuss the application of this debate to Turkey (Chaps. 3 and 4). We also consider in a similar way the turn to cash-based assistance in the humanitarian context and its application to the Syrian refugee population in Turkey (Chaps. 5 and 6). From a foundation in the scientific literature, these discussions are further informed by a systematic survey of relevant Turkish and EU documentation. This provides the background critical to understanding and evaluating the practical policy examples that form the book’s empirical core. A secondary, but important, purpose is to provide readers interested in pursuing the issues we raise with a thorough and balanced survey of relevant sources.

Chapters 4 and 6 present the first-hand studies that constitute our original contribution to these debates. We use these to test assertions that emerge from the scientific and professional literatures, and to propose further testable hypotheses. It is important to emphasize from the outset the illustrative purpose of the case studies: we do not seek to provide either an encyclopedic survey of all cash transfer programs in Turkey or an all-encompassing vision of the issues facing international forced migrants. Our choice of this approach is informed by the questions we seek to answer: assessing “membership” or “inclusion” requires close observation—even if this necessarily restricts the ground that can be covered.

Complementing the documentary sources, our case studies are informed by interviews, as well as unstructured background conversations, with program designers and administrators, and nondirective interviews with the recipients of social assistance, supplemented by participant observation of program procedures. These were carried out as part of several different research programs in 2014, 2019, and 2020. All interviews and observations were carried out by the authors, and done on the basis of anonymity and non-identifiability. For this reason, we do not give name or location of the two districts described in Chap. 4—referring only to an “urban” and a “rural” district. Similarly, we do not provide details about persons interviewed, citing interviews only by date.

For the two local cases in Chap. 4, a total of 49 unstructured interviews were carried out with officials of district municipalities, political parties, and district Social Assistance and Solidarity Foundations as well as recipients of aid. In the case of the urban district, this was complemented by participant observations accompanying workers for competing parties over the course of a local election campaign.

In the case of cash assistance to Syrian refugees, a total of 18 unstructured interviews were carried out with persons directly involved in the design and management of the Emergency Social Safety Net (ESSN) the principal program of unrestricted cash transfer for forced migrants. In every case, the views expressed were those of the individuals interviewed and not of the institutions to which they belonged.

This was complemented by participant observation, carried out at the invitation and with the authorization of the World Food Program, with mixed WFP/TRC teams carrying out home visits in the context of the Comprehensive Vulnerability Monitoring Exercise intended to provide these agencies with information on the determinants of refugee vulnerability. Our observation was necessarily limited by language barriers but was carried out to the greatest extent possible with the assistance of Arabic-speaking members of the WFP/TRC teams with which the visits were made.

3 A Note on Currency Conversion

A ubiquitous problem faced in presenting historical economic data lies in determining the present value of monetary sums. Throughout this book, we present all monetary amounts as they existed at the time, that is, in local currency expressed in nominal terms. The following elements allow readers to approximate the contemporary value of these amounts. European central bank data show the value of the Turkish Lira (TL) at between 2 and 3 for €1 between 2010 and 2014, between 3 and 4 for €1 from the start of 2015 through the first semester of 2017, and trending toward a further loss of value since then. At the time of this writing, in August 2020, the TL was valued at approximately 8.5 for €1.Footnote 2 A more useful contextualization is provided by reference to the evolution of the minimum wage in Turkey during the time covered by this study. According to OECD data, gross minimum wage rose from 750 TL per month in 2010, to 1275 TL per month in 2015, and 2030 per month in 2018.Footnote 3 The sums proposed by the various programs analyzed in this book, typically between 100 TL and 200 TL, must accordingly be understood as significant but nevertheless modest sums, even in the context of a low-income household.