Brownlee, Jason. "Why Turkey’s authoritarian descent shakes up democratic theory". The Washington Post, 23 March 2016.

Brownlee, Jason. "Why Turkey’s authoritarian descent shakes up democratic theory". The Washington Post, 23 March 2016.

• Political scientists have consistently endorsed the axiom that wealthy democracies do not become dictatorships. The general upper limit for wealth is set at $8,043 per capita, the level of Argentina when Isabel Peron was overthrown in 1975.
• This rule does not apply for states heavily dependent on oil revenues, which see returns to dictatorship at far higher rates of per capita income.
• Turkey appears set to buck this trend, as it has a GDP per capita above the 1975 Argentine benchmark, but has become increasingly authoritarian and undemocratic under the control of President Recep Erdogan and the AKP. In 2013, when the AKP first took power, it had a GDP per capita of $8,300.
• Prior to this, Turkey had conformed to the dataset of democratic resilience, as military coups all occurred when the country was significantly poorer, as its GDP per capita was $3,200, $4,500, and $5,300 in 1960, 1971, and 1980, respectively.
• Turkey has not become wholly authoritarian, as it still holds regular competitive elections. It is just that President Erdogan uses fear tactics and harassment, especially of the Kurdish HDP, to win those elections. There is also a closed media atmosphere, with attacks against academics and journalists being particularly intense.
• The expectation would be that the the doubling the size of the Turkish middle class would secure democracy, but instead the AKP's alliance of the poor and the bourgeois has allowed for economic expansion combined with political repression.
• Turkey remains the only state to be listed in a paper on 'authoritarian resurgence' that exceeds the $8,043 per capita benchmark. So, there are unlikely to be other challenges to this general principle.
• An autocratic shift in Turkey would indicate that the upper limit of wealth needed to avoid dictatorship is far above the 1975 Argentine benchmark. Such an occurrence would indicate that other poor democracies above the benchmark, like Bulgaria, Brazil, or Romania, are at risk of a return to autocracy.