Some Disabled are More Deserving: The Case of US and Turkish Disability Policies

Despite their dissimilar institutional features such as their welfare regimes, policy legacies, political systems, political regimes, or citizenship regimes, both Türkiye and the US offer surprisingly generous benefits to their disabled veterans compared to disabled civilians. Disabled civilians get lower benefits when buying assistive technology (AT), whereas the cost of expensive and advanced AT is fully covered for disabled veterans in both countries. I employ Most Different Systems Design (MDSD) to explore the reasons for this inequality, whereas both Turkey and the US have dissimilar institutional features many of which may potentially be prime candidates for explaining differences in disability policies. I argue that in both countries, it is the informal institution of glorified militarism that has been an overarching informal institution effectively shaping the disability policies and actors’ decision making, in which both countries attribute military-related issues a higher normative position.