Examination of the Period Between 1974-1980 that Led Turkey to the 1980 Military Coup with the Content Analysis Method

The military coup that occurred on September 12, 1980 in Turkey and the factors that caused this coup are still being discussed today. It is clear that there were some certain economic, social, legal and administrative problems lying beneath this military coup. In the literature survey conducted on the subject, it has been observed that the researchers and academics are in dissent on the factors that led to the military coup in Turkey. This study aims to reveal the main factor that triggered the occurrence of the 1980 military coup. The method of the study is the conceptual analysis method, which is one of the two basic methods of content analysis. The data source of the study is constituted by the United Meeting Minutes of the Turkish Grand National Assembly between 1974-1980. In the research, the year 1974 was chosen as the start date of the period leading to the coup, because the influence of the army was observed in the governments established and the government policies released after the memorandum issued on 12 March 1971. In addition, with the escalation of the Cyprus issue, reasons such as the army's return to its barracks and a break in politics were effective in choosing 1974 as the start date of the study. With this method, the factors thought to be effective in the occurrence of the 1980 military coup were grouped under five categories, the contexts in which the words appeared were analyzed using evaluation criteria, and it was tried to determine whether the deputies favored a consensus on the factors in question. The main hypothesis of the study is that the most important factor that triggered the 1980 military coup is the attitudes of the Members of Parliaments (MPs) against the consensus prevented the government from working and caused a clog in the system. In this study, words that appear 10,670 times under the five categories in total were analyzed with the Key-Word-in-Context method in order to test the hypothesis and the validity of this argument was revealed with a rate of 89%.

Keywords

Diplomatic history, military coup, content analysis, ınstability, culture of consensus