A difficult change: norm contestation in multiple veto player settings

Official URL: https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14683857.2025.2532958

How do international norms diffuse into a domestic setting with multiple veto players? The extant scholarship has moved beyond system-centric explanations by recognizing the central role played by agency in mitigating norm diffusion. This article links the scholarly work on norm contestation to economic reform literature to evince how veto players with divergent preferences can become the main drivers of norm contestation. While privatization arose as an international norm in the 1980s under the Washington Consensus, the current article investigates how it encountered staunch contestation in Turkey during the 1990s and early 2000s. In this period, norm-conforming ruling parties strategically modified their behaviour to confront multiple norm-contesting veto players, ultimately culminating in privatization after a prolonged process. Accordingly, the Turkish case shows that norm adoption is not necessarily a one-time occurrence and can come after a rational-choice-informed bargaining process in the domestic realm.