Erdem Demirtaş

Publications & Working Papers

Journal articles and working papers on courts, constitutions, democratic backsliding and political language — most combining large original datasets with computational text analysis.

FORTHCOMING

Proportionality Without Uniformity: A Computational Analysis of Doctrinal Scaffolding Across Qualified Rights in the European Court of Human Rights

FORTHCOMINGHuman Rights Law Review

Qualified Convention rights are usually assumed to share a single proportionality framework. Computational analysis of 2,005 ECtHR judgments across Articles 3, 6 and 8–11 reveals a stable settlement–justification architecture — General Principles sections formulaic and precedent-anchored, Assessment sections case-specific and cautious — that varies by right: Article 8 stabilises doctrine through proportionality recitation, Articles 10 and 11 through democratic-value formulas. A right's normative character shapes not only whether the Court balances, but how it builds the framework within which balancing occurs.

REVISE & RESUBMIT

The Turkish Constitutional Court Database: Norm Review and Individual Application Decisions, 1962–2025

R&RJournal of Law and Courts

Introduces a dual-corpus database on the Turkish Constitutional Court spanning its full history: 5,513 norm review and 16,626 individual application decisions with claim-level outcomes, full texts and validated classifications, plus a companion dataset on all 138 justices. The data make two central quantities of comparative judicial politics — disagreement and avoidance — measurable at population scale, revealing, for instance, dissent rising from six percent in the Court's sections to forty-seven percent in its plenary.

UNDER REVIEW

Stability and Selective Rewiring in the Turkish Constitutional Court (1962–2024): A Diachronic Analysis Using Contextual Word Embeddings

UNDER REVIEWArtificial Intelligence and Law

Applies a domain-specific legal BERT model to 5,441 Turkish Constitutional Court decisions, tracking sixteen constitutional concepts across six periods demarcated by institutional ruptures. The dominant pattern is stability: most concepts hold their semantic positions through coups, constitutional replacements and regime change. Change is selective — only secularism shows dramatic relational rewiring, concentrated after 1997 — and new concepts such as proportionality enter by emergence rather than transformation. The first large-scale evidence of conceptual resilience in constitutional adjudication.

Selective Noncompliance: Constitutional Court Judgments and Ordinary Court Resistance in Turkey

UNDER REVIEWInternational Journal of Constitutional Law

Develops the concept of selective noncompliance: ordinary courts routinely implement constitutional court decisions while systematically refusing them in a small, politically concentrated set of cases — in Turkey since 2018, fourteen of sixteen confirmed refusals involve opposition politicians, journalists or politically sensitive defendants. A competing-principals mechanism explains the pattern: judges answer in law to a constitutional court that cannot sanction, and in practice to an executive-aligned career authority that controls their advancement — autocratic legalism from below.

When Parliaments Stop Discussing Policy: Speech Composition under Personalist Executive Dominance in Turkey, 2002–2025

UNDER REVIEWEuropean Journal of Political Research

What do legislators do with the floor once parliament can no longer shape policy? Analysing 363,049 plenary speeches from the Turkish Grand National Assembly with corpus-driven dictionaries and legislator fixed effects: within the same legislators, legislative specificity falls by nearly forty percent, confrontation triples across both blocs, and symbolic-majoritarian rhetoric nearly triples only among governing-party legislators. Structural-break tests place the shift in the 2013–2016 collapse of parliamentary leverage — not the 2018 constitutional change.

WORKING PAPERS

Written Dissent under Authoritarian Consolidation: Judicial Dissent in the Turkish Constitutional Court, 1962–2025

WORKING PAPER

Comparative work expects polarization to make written judicial dissent more likely. In the near-complete record of the Court's norm-review decisions, the relationship is flat before authoritarian consolidation and turns sharply negative after 2016. The contraction concentrates in politically visible abstract review and holds within the seventeen justices observed on both sides of 2016 — evidence that consolidation raised the cost of putting disagreement on the public record, steepest where the record is most visible.

When Every Concept Looks Contested: Measurement Artifacts in Embedding-Based Claims about Political Meaning

WORKING PAPER

Claims that political groups understand the same concept differently increasingly rest on the divergence of group-conditioned embeddings, certified by permutation tests. Applied to the Turkish parliament and the UK House of Commons, that template fails in both directions — certification fires for nearly every concept it touches. The paper develops a two-layer diagnostic separating a concept's association from its deployment, evaluated against dependence-robust nulls and positive controls, and proposes minimum reporting standards for concept-level meaning claims from political text.