Extended Summary

This study addresses a central paradox in contemporary political economy: how can political stability persist under conditions of deepening economic dissatisfaction? In Turkey between 2002 and 2025, household debt-to-income ratios rose from 4.3% to over 50% at their peak, economic satisfaction collapsed to 22% by 2025, yet the ruling coalition retained a stable electoral majority. This study argues that household indebtedness functions as an indirect mechanism for producing political consent — one whose political function has shifted historically from active consent production during periods of economic expansion, through fragile consent under political-economic tension, to a governmentality technique generating passive consent in recent years.

The theoretical framework integrates Foucault’s concept of governmentality with global financialization processes (Krippner, Gabor) and Turkey-specific political economy dynamics. Boratav’s analysis of real wage suppression and Buğra’s work on the weak welfare state establish the structural conditions under which borrowing became a necessary income substitute. This foundation is deepened through Lazzarato’s “indebted subject,” Graeber’s account of debt as moral obligation, Zelizer’s sociology of the social meanings of money, and Bruff’s “authoritarian neoliberalism.”

The research draws on BRSA credit statistics, CBRT Financial Stability Reports, and TurkStat data to trace debt stock, real wage erosion, and debt-to-income ratios across 23 years. The periodization rests on structural conjunctures where debt composition, income dynamics, and political regime character shift simultaneously. The study does not claim a direct causal relationship between indebtedness and political support, but identifies a structural mechanism through which debt increases the perceived cost of political opposition by constraining risk-taking under conditions of indebted vulnerability.

The first period (2002–2013) constitutes the active consent phase. Credit card debt, initially dominant in 2002 (65.7% of total consumer credit), gave way to housing credit as the leading category by 2013 (33.2%, up from 7.0%) — a shift reflecting the maturation of Turkey’s mortgage system following the 2007 Mortgage Law. Over this period, the debt-to-income ratio rose from 4.3% to 53%. Economic satisfaction reached approximately 58% (KONDA) while the AKP’s vote share climbed from 34.3% to 49.8%. Rather than delivering welfare through social policy, the state directed households toward credit markets, constructing a market-based welfare regime that generated active political support during the growth years.

The second period (2013–2018) represents “fragile consent.” The Gezi protests, the Fed’s Taper Tantrum, and subsequent political crises began to unravel the earlier parallel between indebtedness and satisfaction. Economic satisfaction declined from 58% to 38%; TurkStat’s Economic Confidence Index fell from 101 to 71. Consumer credit and credit card use expanded as borrowing increasingly financed current consumption rather than asset accumulation. In Lazzarato’s terms, the “promise of the future” gave way to “anxiety about the future,” though political support remained relatively stable.

The third period (2018–2025) marks a decisive rupture. Between 2012 and 2020, labour productivity increased by 45.2% while real wages rose by only 1.8% (DİSK, 2020); in the first eleven months of 2025, inflation and rising tax burdens produced a 2.1 trillion TL wage erosion for workers covered by social security (DİSK-AR, 2025). Credit card debt’s share of total consumer loans followed a V-shaped trajectory: after declining steadily from 65.7% in 2002 to a historic low of 20.8% in 2018 — as housing credit expanded to absorb an increasing share of household borrowing — it surged to a historic high of 48.8% by 2025, directed increasingly toward food, utilities, and rent. This sharp reversal marks the transition from debt as an investment tool to debt as a survival mechanism.

A key empirical finding is the disconnect between collapsing economic satisfaction and stable political support: in the 2023 elections, Erdoğan received 52% of the vote and the People’s Alliance 52.2%. This is precisely the configuration the concept of passive consent is designed to explain. Passive consent refers to a condition in which individuals do not actively support the political order, yet refrain from opposition due to the perceived risks imposed by economic vulnerability, resulting in compliance without normative endorsement. The indebted subject has mortgaged not only current income but future capacity for dissent: unemployment or income loss could render debt repayment impossible, making sustained opposition a cost that the economically precarious cannot easily absorb.

The study makes three contributions. First, it demonstrates the historically contingent character of debt’s political function in a country without a strong welfare state tradition, extending the sociology of debt beyond its predominantly Western frame. Second, it foregrounds the qualitative transformation of debt — from housing credit to credit card borrowing for basic needs — as a shift in social meaning and political valence, not merely in financial behavior. Third, by conceptualizing “passive consent,” it provides an analytical tool for cases where economic dissatisfaction does not translate into political change. Identity politics, nationalism, and media control remain operative factors; the political function of debt is indirect and conditional, not deterministic.

While the empirical focus is Turkey, the framework developed here — particularly the concept of passive consent — offers analytical purchase for contexts where financialization, wage suppression, and democratic erosion intersect. What the Turkish case demonstrates is that debt can function not only as an economic burden but as a structural condition that depresses the capacity for political agency.