This article examines the affective foundations of disability policymaking in Turkey, analyzing how political actors mobilize emotions to legitimize policy design and comparing the affective framings advanced by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP).
The corpus comprises 34 discursive segments derived from 16 public statement sources by AKP and CHP politicians (2018–2025), supplemented by four semi-structured interviews with disability rights activists. Drawing on Wetherell et al.’s (2015) affective-discursive framework, the material was analyzed through four a priori themes: affective registers, paternalistic-charitable and rights-based framings of state responsibility and familialism.
AKP politicians mobilize compassion grounded in an Islamic ethos and pride in policy achievements, framing state responsibility through religious duty, paternalistic care and familial unity. CHP politicians draw on enthusiasm and hope to articulate an alternative vision centered on social rights, equality, employment and a stronger welfare state, though rarely specifying implementation mechanisms. Emotions do not merely accompany disability policy discourse; they shape competing understandings of state responsibility, care, citizenship and the family.
The article extends critical disability studies by showing that emotions are constitutive of how policy is framed, legitimized and contested and extends scholarship on affective governance – largely developed through Western welfare retrenchment – by demonstrating that affect can operate equally through charity- and family-mediated welfare expansion.
