Political Parties and Grassroots Clientelist Strategies in Urban Turkey: One Neighbourhood at a Time

Both principal Turkish political parties make extensive use of patron–client networks, but in very different ways. The CHP relies on competing local brokers and synchronous vote buying. The AKP is at the centre of a network of public and private funding turning social policy to clientelist ends. Socially anchored AKP activists link the party to voters, allowing it to target social assistance for political advantage and take credit for improvement in local conditions. The case presented in this paper provides a natural experiment suggesting that this distinction is an important explanation for the AKP’s electoral success in low-income urban areas.     

Reproducing ‘hegemony’ thereafter? The long-term political effects of the Gezi protests in Turkey

ABSTRACT

This study examines an understudied aspect of the Gezi protests: its long-term effects on the hegemonic politics of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalk?nma Partisi, AKP) government. Building on the insights of Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and Stuart Hall on hegemonic struggles and populism, it contends that the Gezi protests forced the AKP to reformulate its hegemonic strategies by deconstructing the relation formed contingently between the AKP and democratization, and thus, exposing both the limits of the neoliberal and Islamic/conservative hegemonic politics of the AKP, and the authoritarian tendencies of this government. The article maintains that the AKP, in response, turned to focus its efforts on becoming not hegemonic, but dominant by adopting a full-blown authoritarian populism, which, rather than entailing the closure of all democratic channels, favours retaining some for mobilizing popular support for its increasing authoritarianism. It is demonstrated that this popular support has been secured by the AKP through the articulation of a discourse that ignites fear and anxiety among the conservative religious and conservative nationalist segments, by portraying all opposition as detrimental to their interests and lifestyles. The article concludes that counter-hegemonic movements like Gezi may lead to significant political changes in the long run, even if they are repressed.     

Struggling for the Kurdish vote: religion,ethnicity and victimhood in AKP and BDP/HDP rally speeches

This study explores the competition for Turkey's Kurdish vote through the instrumentalization of religion, ethnicity and victimhood in political competition. This becomes possible through the study of rally speeches of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalk?nma Partisi – AKP), the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (Bar?? ve Demokrasi Partisi – BDP) and the Peoples’ Democratic Party (Halklar?n Demokratik Partisi – HDP), in Turkey's June 2011 and June 2015 general elections. The AKP campaigns framed the resolution of the Kurdish issue along with an updated version of the ‘Turkish Islamic Synthesis’. The issue of ethnicity was toned down in contrast to the idea of common victimhood of pious Turkish and Kurdish Muslims in republican Turkey. On the other hand, the BDP/HDP moved from a more ethnic-oriented and exclusive identity approach in 2011 to a more inclusive, liberal and extrovert agenda based on a civic definition of Turkish national identity in 2015. Religion and victimhood appear as the two most enduring symbolic resources for political party mobilization.     

Islamist Mobilisation in Secularist Strongholds: Institutional Change and Electoral Performance in Turkey

How do Islamist parties mobilise support and win elections in secularist strongholds? What explains the electoral performance of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey’s most consistently secularist region – western Anatolia? This article explores these questions with a comparative case study of two similar cities in the periphery of ?zmir where the AKP registered significantly different electoral results: Ödemi? and Salihli. It shows that deep institutional transformations of the local party organisations, including leadership turnover, reshuffling of the party cadres, and an explicit attempt by local party leaders to moderate and move to the political centre, were necessary factors for the AKP to succeed in elections where the Islamist constituency is weak.     

Political Parties and Women’s Rights in Turkey

Abstract

Political parties are important political actors, but they are seldom studied in relation to human rights. This article examines the human rights discourse of political parties in Turkey by focusing on women’s rights. The content analysis of party programmes issued by major political parties between 1923 and 2007 reveals significant differences and changes in parties’ approach to women, ranging from no mentioning of women to addressing women’s issues from a feminist perspective. Women’s rights and issues, once neglected practically by all political parties, have gained attention during the last few decades, largely due to women’s activism. While conservative, religious, and Turkish nationalist parties started to display a dualist approach that combines traditionalism with gender equality, social democrat, socialist, and pro-Kurdish parties increasingly employ feminist terminology and analysis.     

The intersectionality of gender,sexuality, and religion: novelties and continuities in Turkey during the AKP era

ABSTRACT

This article argues that in the AKP era, gender and sexuality play a central role in reshaping the secular-religious divide to instil ‘yeni milli’ (new national) – or as AKP members call it, ‘yerli ve milli’ (homegrown and national)- values. Adopting a feminist and reflexive approach, this article seeks to demonstrate that Erdo?an and the AKP have used gender and sexuality-related issue areas not as diversions to highjack the public agenda, as it is often assumed, but as a medium to regulate the neoliberal redistribution of conservative values. After a brief presentation of the historical background of the gendered evolution of the secular-religious divide in Turkish politics, this article focuses on the following three particular cases: the policies and discourse on LGBTI rights; the link that was established between the reproductive rights of women and ethnic identity; and how the AKP created new types of ‘other men’ and ‘other women.’ The article also seeks to show that in each case the meanings attributed to the secular and the religious in the secular-religious divide have shifted accordingly and that shift was reflective of, and was used to instil the particular set of values supportive of particular political positions.     

Emergence of a Dominant Party System After Multipartyism: Theoretical Implications from the Case of the AKP in Turkey

This study aims to provide insights into how and why a dominant party system emerges after an era of multipartyism. Conceptualising the emergence phase of a dominant party system within the framework of Sartori's ‘predominant party system’, it elaborates the causal weight of different theories within the Turkish context through a comparative-historical analysis. Comparing the case of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) with the Justice Party (AP), it argues that perceptions of an incumbent's good economic performance and lack of centrifugal intra-party conflicts are two crucial factors that lead to the emergence of a dominant party system after multipartyism. Restrictive electoral rules and existing social cleavages, however, create a favourable setting for this outcome.     

From AKP’s ‘Conservative Democracy’ to ‘Advanced Democracy’: Shifts and Challenges in the Debate on ‘Europe’

Abstract

Following the AKP’s victory in the 2002 general elections, ‘conservative democracy’ has emerged as a trademark in Turkish politics, focusing on cosmopolitanism and European integration. In the late 2000s, the party’s favourite notion was ‘advanced democracy’, this time underlining Turkey’s leadership claim in the region and displaying a more critical approach to ‘Europe’. In this paper, I aim to show how different narratives on ‘Europe’ emerged within the context of these empty signifiers. The paper claims that the difference in the two narratives on ‘Europe’ in two different periods does not point to a complete and fully fledged de-Europeanisation trend.     

Understanding Turkish secularism in the 21th century: a contextual roadmap

ABSTRACT

This paper asserts that Turkish secularism and Islamism represent two faces of one coin – contemporary Turkish politics – when one considers their goals and strategies. The two ideological movements have shaped one another and each now seeks to impose itself as superior. This article unpacks these differences and similarities in the following steps: (a) it defines the socio-historic modes of Turkish secularism and (b) examines its social and political origins; (c) it then explores Islam’s return to the public domain as an oppositional Turkish identity; (d) and thereafter considers the diverse understandings of secularism resulting from neoliberal policies that relaxed state control over Islam, which then prompted socially-acceptable reinterpretations of Islam; and finally (e) describes how the AKP’s has re-imagined secularism while (mis)using Islam as a political instrument. The comparison highlights such commonalties as a collectivist character, a desire for state control as a vehicle to realize an ideology, intolerance of diversity and criminalization of other perspectives, and the differentiation of religion as morality in the private sphere versus its cultural role in the public sphere. It concludes that, under the AKP government, Islam is used as a tool to consolidate the power of Erdo?an’s kleptocratic regime.     

The feminist movement during the AKP era in Turkey: challenges and opportunities

This article explores women's rights activism in Turkey during the Justice and Development Party's (AKP) time in power (2002–present). A comparative analysis of three feminist campaigns for policy reform shows that in a context in which majority public opinion and the policy preferences of the ruling party militate against feminist policy proposals, a strong political ally (the European Union) was necessary to generate a policy change. The article also argues that the political opportunity structures within which feminists are embedded have been reconfigured over the course of the AKP's three terms in power, leaving the AKP in a stronger position to resist feminists’ demands. This explains the paradox of an internally stronger and more dynamic social movement that, nevertheless, appears to have weakened vis-à-vis the state. Furthermore, because some recent legal reforms do not significantly reflect the AKP's or much of the public's preferences, the movement has been less able to generate implementation of recent policy changes.     

Reassessing Turkish National Memory: An Analysis of the Representation of Turkish National Memory by the AKP

In this article continuity and discontinuity of interpretations and manipulations of national memory during the successive governments of the Adalet ve Kalk?nma Partisi (Justice and Development Party – AKP) in Turkey are investigated. The strong continuities between the Islamist parties of the 1990s and the AKP, with regard to the way they consider and manipulate Ottoman history as a means of political legitimation, are demonstrated. In addition, the continuity between the AKP's style of governance and that of preceding governments is shown. The conclusion of the article is that, in addition to continuities with its Islamist predecessors, the AKP is to a large extent still embedded within the boundaries of the nationalist framework set out by Kemalism with regard to the party's stance on Turkish citizenship, national identity, traumas in national history and leader-centred politics.     

The regulation of party switching in Africa

The article presents a complete overview of existing regulations of party switching in Africa since the reintroduction of multiparty politics in the early 1990s. While most established democracies do not see any reason for sanctioning with legal restrictions the decision of members of parliament to change their party affiliation, in Africa many countries take a critical stance towards party switching. Frequent party switching is considered to weaken political parties, to hinder the institutionalisation of party systems, and to endanger the stability of government and the legitimacy of democracy. The article distinguishes legal regulations of party switching conceptually by what is prohibited and its enforcement. A preliminary analysis shows that anti-defection laws indeed matter for party system institutionalisation in Africa's emerging democracies.     

Anti-Iraq War Protests in Turkey: Global Networks,Coalitions, and Context

This article examines how Turkish citizens participated in protests against the Iraq War and why civil society organizations were able to mobilize tens of thousands of people across the country despite the institutional weakness of the Turkish peace movement. The Iraq War case is important in that its scale and level of protest mobilization were unprecedented based on any other anti-war protests in Turkey. Using content analysis of newspaper reports of anti-Iraq War protest events, this article maps the patterns and forms of protest against the Iraq War and argues for the importance of global networks, coalitions among organizations, and political context for protest mobilization.     

From paradigm shift to retooling: the foundation and maintenance of the AKP

ABSTRACT

This article examines the foundation of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalk?nma Partisi-AKP) after a paradigm shift and its maintenance through retooling, which involves strategic positionings and tactical manoeuvres within its new paradigm. The positionings and manoeuvres that the party took vis-à-vis states of exception have been imperative for its survival in government. The main argument of the article is that the AKP retooled itself in the face of crises rather than going through a paradigmatic change, that is to say, resorting back to the Islamism of the party elite’s origins, in Kuhnian terms. Through the fluidity of its discourse and the unrivalled charisma of its leader, the AKP has -multiple times- changed the center of gravity of its discourse and policies without having to disarticulate its founding political imaginary. Neither its recently increased nationalism nor authoritarianism was the result of an ideological orientation, just like the democratic reforms in its initial years. They were mostly by-products of survival efforts at power positioning, through retooling.     

Pseudo‐democratic politics and populist possibilities: the rise and demise of Turkey's Refah party

Within the span of only a few years, Turkish politics witnessed the dramatic rise and fall of the Refah Party. This transformation from relative obscurity to the head of a ruling coalition and eventual banning was caused by a combination of features inherent in the Turkish political system and the party itself. Turkish democracy features the continued interference of the military in domestic political affairs on the one hand and a preponderance of largely centrist and bland ‘mainstream’ parties on the other. Nevertheless, the existence of ostensibly democratic institutions such as elections or a parliament enable potential political aspirants who are outside the mainstream to make bids for power through officially sanctioned channels. The Refah's rise was a product of the perceived uniqueness of its ideological platform and its unparalleled focus on grass roots voter mobilization. Its fall, however, came when the military considered it to have overstepped the bounds of acceptable political behaviour within the country's narrowly defined democracy.     

Self-Restraint in Search of Legitimacy: The Reform of the Argentine Supreme Court

In 2003, the Argentine executive promoted a process of Supreme Court reform that entailed limiting presidential attributions in the selection of justices. Then the renewed court implemented changes to its internal procedures that increased its own accountability mechanisms. The literature on the politics of institutional judicial independence in Latin America has developed two explanatory models: one presents reforms as an insurance policy, the other as a consequence of divided government. Both perspectives conceive of reforms as a result of political competition and as a way to limit other actors, the future government in the first case, the party in power in the second. This study, by contrast, explains the Argentine reforms as movements of strategic self-restriction, designed to build legitimacy and credibility, for the government and the court, respectively, in a context of social and institutional crisis and pressure from civil society.     

A World Bank Project Implemented by a Moderate Islamic Party: The Social Risk Mitigation Project in Turkey

This paper presents some related processes in Turkey which have been initiated or influenced by the World Bank's execution of the Social Risk Mitigation Project (SRMP). It argues that the Justice and Development Party (AKP), as a party that redefined social assistance as charity by incorporating Islamic values with neo-liberalism, benefited from the SRMP for increasing its public support. It also demonstrates how the AKP's use of this project for its political aims led to some unintended consequences, causing the production and spreading of discourses about the poor, the Kurdish population and the emergence of a culture of poverty in the country.     

Islamist politics in migrant cities: local identity cleavages and intra-party politics in Turkey

This article explores how the local party organizations of the Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi (Justice and Development Party—AKP) interact with complex social structures in migrant-receiving cities in Turkey. Islamist movements are widely viewed as uniquely capable of appealing to working-class migrants. However, the support for Islamist parties varies across migrant-receiving cities. This article argues that local party organizations face two potential sources of discord that they have to resolve in order to build support in migrant neighbourhoods. They have to bridge the regional identity cleavages among different migrant communities while surmounting intra-party conflicts. In pursuing this argument, this article opens up the black box of local identity politics in the industrial heartland of Turkey and provides an ethnographic account of intra-party conflicts and political survival within the AKP.     

An alternative reading of religion and authoritarianism: the new logic between religion and state in the AKP’s New Turkey

ABSTRACT

Since roughly 2011, the Turkish state and the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) have been going through a process of mutual transformation. Some of the historical apprehensions, biases and frustrations exhibited by Turkey as a middle power have been absorbed by the relatively reformist AKP. Conversely, the AKP and its undisputed leader Erdo?an have seen their socio-political fears, power based conflicts and ethno-religious desires become dominant in all areas, including religion. As a consequence of this bilateral transformation, Turkey has become both an inclusionary and a hegemonic-authoritarian state, and at the same time a weak one. Within this new identity and structure of the state, Sunni Islam has become one of the regime’s key focal points, with a new logic. This article seeks to explain the transformation of the relations between the AKP’s Turkish state, religion and religious groups, by scrutinising Karrie Koesel’s logic of state-religion interaction in authoritarian regimes.     

Institutional dynamics and party think tank development: Britain and Germany compared

Official party think tanks have been a fixture in a number of Western European democracies for many decades but not so in the Anglo-American democratic sphere even though think tanks aligned to parties have flourished. This article explores the reasons that party and think tank ties have evolved differently in these two settings through an examination of the party think tank scene in Germany and Britain. It is suggested that the predominant form of democracy operating in each of these settings helps to explain this critical difference. While the adversarial tendencies of the British political system militate against parties taking much of an interest in establishing official party think tanks, the consensual institutional dynamics associated with Germany’s political system has encouraged parties to sponsor their formation, and reinforced the perceived importance of the party think tank vehicle as agents of democratic linkage.