Turkey's recent autocratic turn has sent shockwaves through the international community. Long heralded as a model for the rest of the Muslim world, the ruling Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi; AKP), appeared to be on a successful economic and political trajectory, blending Islamic themes with democracy and development. In the immediate wake of the Arab Spring, this “Turkish model” was deemed an obvious answer to the democratic openings in Egypt and Tunisia. But as Istanbul's Taksim Square came to resemble Tahrir, swelling with protesters in and around Gezi Park, the government's coercive response challenged the image of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as an Islamic democrat. Since then, the jailing of academics and journalists and a protracted military offense in the Kurdish southeast have knocked the Turkish model off of its pedestal, raising questions about its sudden shift in policy.

Tuğal's explanation for the collapse of Islamic liberalism in Turkey is framed within a political economic discussion of class and power. In The Fall of the Turkish Model, he argues that the Islamic neoliberal project in Turkey suffers from a number of key flaws that simultaneously limit its exportability to the rest of the Muslim Middle East while leading to its collapse domestically. On the one hand, it has failed to improve the lives of most Turkish citizens by some key quantitative and qualitative measures. In other words, even the early successes of the Turkish model may have been overstated. On the other hand, it has failed to satisfy the desires of the subaltern strata that it initially mobilized, who want certain freedoms and quality of life that economic development, alone, cannot deliver. This newly mobilized but ultimately dissatisfied, new middle class has recently revolted and has been met with repression, deepening its dissatisfaction.

Beyond these internal failings which render it increasingly unstable at home, the Turkish model is not as easily exportable as some pundits and scholars have assumed, Tuğal argues. Its ability to take root in any given society critically depends on the composition and professionalism of its “political society,” or what political scientists would call its nonstate political elites. The fragmentation and limited professionalization of this elite class, especially in Egypt but also to some extent in Tunisia, created natural obstacles for the development of Islamic liberalism, long before the Arab Spring and well after. The failure of Islamic neoliberalism in the region as a whole, Tuğal concludes, opens the door for a leftist movement that could plausibly grow out of the ashes of Tahrir and Gezi under the right circumstances.

In challenging the dominant view of Turkey as a regional success story, Tuğal has entered into an important discussion regarding the long-term stability of neoliberal politics and economics, in the Muslim world and beyond, avoiding the classic and somewhat superficial question of the compatibility of Islam and capitalist democracy. In evaluating his contribution, my perspective is that of a political scientist, with a set of methodological orientations that may differ from those of the author, a sociologist. It would be unfair to critique Tuğal and his argument based on a methodology that is not his; so instead, I offer the following as suggestions for what political scientific theories and methods could add to this intellectual endeavor.

The first broad suggestion centers around the question of causality, something that political scientists take quite seriously. In reading through the book and tracing the central argument, it is at times unclear who (or what) exactly is the causal agent in the demise of the Turkish model. A cursory look at the title would suggest that the Arab uprisings were key—either because they revealed that the Turkish model was not easily exportable or because they threatened Islamic neoliberalism within Turkey itself—but this argument appears only minimally in the text. Tuğal's main point is that Turkish-style Islamic neoliberalism failed to take hold in Egypt, Tunisia, and Iran in the decades leading up to the Arab Spring for precisely the same reasons it failed to take hold there in the years since—namely, the fragmentation of the Islamic movement and, to a lesser extent, its professionalism. In the end, it would seem, little about the Arab Spring itself changed the fate of the Turkish model in the Arab world. It did not suddenly reveal that the model could not be exported and implanted elsewhere.

Another reading of the title is that the events of the Arab Spring undermined the Turkish model domestically, but this too does not seem to be the argument that Tuğal is making. Other than mentioning Erdoğan's “imperial overreaching” in the Syrian case, few connections are drawn between changes in the Arab world and Turkey's autocratic turn at home. Instead, the main argument is that the Turkish model collapsed from within. Yet, even here the causal agent and the causal process are a bit unclear. Tuğal cites overconfidence on the part of the newly mobilized subaltern strata; on the other hand, he cites their dissatisfaction. At the same time, he notes the very real impact that the Syrian Civil War has had on Erdoğan's political calculations at home, but the interaction between these international factors and domestic classist tensions is not explicitly defined.

Ultimately, I understand Tuğal's argument to be about the failure of Islamic neoliberalism to satisfy the demands of many of its previous supporters, both at home and abroad. But without a clear definition of the causal agent and the ultimate outcome—what could be called the independent and dependent variables—it is difficult to understand what his argument has to say about the crisis of neoliberalism beyond the Turkish case. At times, Tuğal seems to indicate that Islamic neoliberalism was initially successful and then collapsed, whether under its own weight or as the result of some international hegemonic shift. At others, quantitative and qualitative evidence describes a system that was flawed—undemocratic and unequal—from the start. By the end, it is unclear whether the Gezi Park protests were a symptom of the system's decline or one of its (many) consequences.

In his discussions of the role of political society in supporting the development of Islamic neoliberalism, I believe Tuğal may be right to focus on the fragmentation of the Islamic movement when explaining the consolidation of a particular political and economic model, whether neoliberal, corporatist, or otherwise. But the sharp line he draws between political society, on the one hand, and (state) institutions, on the other, relies on a definition of institutions that may be too narrow. Following the work of Douglas North, political scientists and economists often define an institution as any human construct that structures political, economic, or social interactions. This broader view of institutions serves to highlight the ways in which state power structures interact with nonstate organizations and even informal institutions to constrain individuals’ choice of strategy. In treating the state as something distinct from or outside of political society, Tuğal underestimates, for example, the role of electoral democracy in consolidating the Islamic movement in Turkey and how its absence may have encouraged the fragmentation of the movement elsewhere.

In this expanded view of institutions, the Turkish model becomes one: a set of constraints on human interaction that has been, at times, more or less democratic, more or less neoliberal, and more or less Islamic. In highlighting the difficulty of transplanting this model elsewhere, Tuğal joins a growing literature in political science that questions the exportability of some overarching institutions where the underlying ones—including culture, an informal institution—are different. Ultimately, The Fall of the Turkish Model makes an important contribution by raising these questions in the case of Islam and the Middle East. In addition, in tracing the arc of Islamic neoliberalism in the Turkish case, Tuğal challenges the future of this institution even where it first developed. The book is therefore well placed to contribute to a global discussion of Turkey and its position in the Middle East and in the international community.