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 assumed to share one proportionality framework. A computational analysis of 2,005 ECtHR judgments across Articles 3, 6 and 8–11 shows otherwise. Every judgment follows the same two-part architecture — formulaic, precedent-anchored General Principles, then cautious case-specific Assessment — but each right builds it differently: Article 8 through the recitation of proportionality, Articles 10 and 11 through democratic-value formulas. A right's normative character shapes not only whether the Court balances, but how it constructs the framework in which balancing takes place.

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 covering the Turkish Constitutional Court's entire history: 5,513 norm review and 16,626 individual application decisions, with claim-level outcomes, full texts and validated classifications, alongside a companion dataset on all 138 justices who have served. It makes two central quantities of comparative judicial politics — judicial disagreement and avoidance — measurable at population scale for the first time, revealing, among other patterns, dissent rates that rise 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, tracing sixteen constitutional concepts across six periods marked by institutional rupture. The dominant finding is stability: most concepts hold their semantic positions through coups, constitutional replacements and regime change. Change is selective — only secularism is dramatically rewired, and mainly after 1997 — while new concepts such as proportionality arrive 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 implement constitutional court judgments as a matter of routine, yet refuse them in a small and politically concentrated set of cases: in Turkey since 2018, fourteen of sixteen confirmed refusals concern opposition politicians, journalists or politically sensitive defendants. A competing-principals mechanism explains why. Judges answer in law to a constitutional court that cannot sanction them, and in practice to an executive-aligned authority that controls their careers — 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? Drawing on 363,049 plenary speeches from the Turkish Grand National Assembly, analysed with corpus-driven dictionaries and legislator fixed effects: among the very same legislators, legislative specificity falls by nearly forty percent, confrontation triples across both blocs, and symbolic-majoritarian rhetoric nearly triples — but only in the governing party. Structural-break tests locate 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 scholarship 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 is concentrated in politically visible abstract review, and holds even within the seventeen justices observed on both sides of 2016 — evidence that consolidation raised the cost of putting disagreement on the public record, most steeply where that record is most visible.

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

WORKING PAPER

Claims that rival political groups understand the same concept differently increasingly rest on divergence between group-conditioned embeddings, certified by permutation tests. Applied to the Turkish parliament and the UK House of Commons, that template fails: certification fires for nearly every concept it touches. The paper proposes a two-layer diagnostic that separates a concept's associations from its deployment, tests it against dependence-robust nulls and positive controls, and sets out minimum reporting standards for concept-level claims about political meaning.