This dissertation examines the relationship between ideologies and political regimes in Turkey and Argentina.

Both Turkey and Argentina during the post-WWII era constitute cases of regime oscillation, however, they have divergent patterns of oscillation. In Turkey, behind the appearance of oscillation there has been an underlying form of stability as a hybrid regime, where democracy has always been ambiguous and authoritarian rule has never been institutionalized. On the other hand, in Argentina, the political regime has oscillated dramatically between limited democracy, different forms of authoritarianism, and finally liberal democracy.

This dissertation aims to overcome some of the problems of explaining oscillating cases with existing approaches to democratization that understand political order as a stable formation. Instead, it introduces an analysis that takes into consideration the ideological and social processes that condition the formation of particular political projects/actors and ensuing political games. In the following pages, I trace the sources of the different political trajectories of Turkey and Argentina to the politics that are constructed around the hegemonizing ideologies of each of these countries, namely, Kemalism and Peronism. I demonstrate that these ideologies have differently ambivalent attitudes towards democracy and liberalism, and this has its roots in their opposing conceptions of nation: the "nation-to-become" of Kemalism versus the "nation-as-is" of Peronism. This divergence in conceptions of who constitutes the polity leads political elite of each ideology to address and in turn enable (interpellate) different social classes and groups as people and citizens.

In conclusion, given their shared uncertainty towards democracy, the critical difference between these two ideologies is their ability to cohere different political groups behind ambivalently democratic projects. This critical difference puts them on divergent trajectories of regime oscillation by propelling dissimilar social formations in their respective political games.