| Coşkun Can Aktan | |
| Birth Date: | 25 January 1963 |
| Workplaces: | Dokuz Eylül University Center for Study of Public Choice, George Mason University, USA |
| Fields: | Public choice Constitutional political economy Institutional economics |
Coşkun Can Aktan (born 1963) is a political economist and a professor at the Faculty of Economics and Management at Dokuz Eylül University in İzmir, Turkey. He is founder and honorary chairman of the Social Sciences Research Society. Aktan is a leading expert on the privatization of the Turkish economy, analyzing and writing on the movement of Turkey from a statist to a market economy from its early days, making Aktan an early and internationally known source of information on Turkey's move toward a market-based economy.
Aktan's work has attracted significant critical attention and praise, and he is widely considered one of the important Turkish intellectual and critical author in social sciences. Aktan's writing has often been explicitly critical of academia, and democracy in particular. He has a strong intellectual and interdisciplinary background to criticize modern electoral democracies and defended limited government and constitutional democracy. In recent years, he published many articles defending a "demarchy" instead of democracy built mainly on the basis of sortition and rotation. He also published numerous critical books and articles on the deformation of higher education and academia.
Coskun Can Aktan is currently a professor at the Faculty of Economics and Management at the Dokuz Eylül University. He worked at several international research centers and universities including the Center for Study of Public Choice, George Mason University, United States; Economics Department of the University of California (UCLA); International Social Sciences Institute of the University of Edinburgh; Institut für Allgemeine für Wirtschaftsforschung of the University of Freiburg (Germany); University of Vrije, Belgium and Mount Kenya University, Kenya as a visiting scholar.
Aktan's research studies were funded by the fellowships and the grants of such organizations as Higher Education Institution of Turkey, Turkish Scientific and Technical Research Institution (TÜBİTAK), Turkish Sciences Academy (TÜBA), George Mason University Foundation (United States), Earhart Foundation (United States), British Council (UK), German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) (Germany), Friedrich-Naumann Foundation (Germany), Japan Foundation (Japan) etc.
Public Finance / Public Economics / Public Choice / Constitutional Economics / Institutional Economics / Political Economy /