I was 11 years old in March 1994 when the Refah Partisi (Welfare Party, RP) gained 19 per cent of the total vote in Turkey’s nationwide local elections held and won the metropolitan municipality of Istanbul where my family was living. My parents generally voted for more liberal parties, as I knew, and I discussed the victory with many members of the working class I knew—housecleaners, doormen, and marginal sector workers. Most of them generally supported right-leaning parties including the RP after their deception with left-wing parties in the 1980s. Ever since I have been curious about the split between working-class and middle-class Turks like my parents, which led me years later to the topic of this book, the emergence and consolidation of the Islamic-leaning Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (Justice and Development Party, JDP), which rested significantly on working-class support and lower segments of the society.
Beyond my personal motives, this research on consolidation and underpinnings of the JDP reflects an understanding that Turkey’s case has unique features with significant implications for the field of comparative politics. While Turkey is integrated into the core architecture of the Western international stage through its membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the European Council, and Custom Unions, it has experienced the rise of political Islam via openly contested elections and a gradual yet persistent drift towards authoritarianism. Some scholars and pundits believed, following the Gezi Park protests of June 2013 and the corruption accusations of December 2013 against the leader of the JDP and members of his cabinet, that it would soon cease to exist. However, the legislative elections of November 2015 revealed the resilience and tactical skills of the JDP in spite of the corroding effects of 14 years in power. These events reveal that the analysis of the party as a political phenomenon is still current and that this drift to authoritarianism and its sustainability needs to be explored in depth. In order to address these questions, it is essential to understand how the JDP’s rise to and consolidation of power occurred.
A further reason to explore the JDP is that Turkey’s shift to authoritarianism is not unique, but a rather prevalent trend of our time. Indeed, even countries fully integrated to Western and liberal order have lately shown a tendency to drift away from their core institutions and gravitate towards authoritarianism. Hungary’s national-conservative and right-wing populist party Fidesz’s supermajority success in the form of three consecutive electoral victories (in 2010, 2014, and 2018) and Poland’s right-wing populist, national-conservative Christian Democratic Law and Justice Party’s obtaining outright majority in 2015 illustrate this trend of which the JDP is a part.
The research questions that drive this book reflect both my interest in Turkey and its relationship to a broader international trend. These relate to how the JDP has become a game changer in both Turkish party system and society and on how the party has consolidated its power and become remarkably resilient over the years of its power. The book attempts to answer these core questions by following the course of this shift to authoritarianism in the Turkish politics and society.
This book goes beyond the debate on secularism and Islam. As the research aimed to investigate the JDP as a model of game changer in both society and party system, it necessitated a theoretical framework scrutinising party system according to sociological factors. To that end, I chose Lipset-Rokkan’s cleavage structure (1967)1 to guide the research. The qualitative methodology was based on in-depth interviews and archival research, which included review of electoral campaign material, grey literature, and statistics related to socioeconomic data. Lipset and Rokkan identify four main cleavages (state-church, centre-periphery, capital owner-worker, and land-industry); for the Turkish context, I adapted it as secularist-Islamist; Turkish-Kurdish, Sunni-Alevi; left-right, centre versus periphery at the centre; big urban conglomerate-peripheral Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs ), respectively. In keeping with the adapted cleavage-structure model, I recruited interviewees from the Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi (Republican People’s Party, CHP), the JDP, and the Saadet Partisi (Felicity Party, SP) to reflect the secularist-Islamist cleavage.
In addition to this adapted cleavage structure, I develop new cleavage structure for clarifying roots of the current Turkish party system. Lipset and Rokkan (1967) considered the Industrial Revolution and French Revolution as the roots of the Western European party systems as the former gave rise to the land-industry divide in Britain and the latter gave rise to the state-church fault line in France. Similarly, I understand the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923 as the root of the Turkish-Ottoman/Republican-Imperial divide that gave rise to the Turkish party system, and hence I developed this overarching Turkish-Ottoman/Republican-Imperial cleavage. To this leading theoretical paradigm, I ultimately added additional theoretical frameworks such as a new version of centre-periphery (Kahraman 2008), machine party politics (Stokes et al. 2013), and the logic of the political survival (Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2003) based on fieldwork data given that the cleavage structure was not sufficient in elaborating the consolidation of the JDP. Examining the party system according to sociological factors is a chief source of novelty in the research presented here, because the scholarly literature on Turkish party systems and parties has generally focused on theories related to electoral institutions (e.g. Sayarı 2007; Özbudun 2013; Gumuscu 2013; Ayan Musil 2011; Ete et al. 2015; Sayarı 2016; Esen and Gumuscu 2016; Wuthrich 2015; Sayarı et al. 2018). Aside from the theoretical part, the book contributes to the existing scholarly literature on the Turkish politics and society with its field research findings. Scholarly work on Turkish politics and society, the JDP, and country studies have increased dramatically over the last decade. This work has addressed a wide range of subjects such as Islamist movements, democratisation, state-military relations, and European Union (EU) membership. I disentangle this growing literature according to the major themes relevant to my objectives, which leads to a focus on research on Turkish politics and the JDP (mainly country studies) and Turkish politics and society and voting behaviour in local and legislative elections.
The majority of scholars who have tackled the JDP’s emergence use the framework of debates on Islamism versus secularism, democratisation, Europeanisation, and state-military relations. Thus, Eligür (2010) explains the rise of political Islam from a social movement theory perspective. She argues that the movement of the Türk-İslam Sentezi (Turkish-Islamic Synthesis), compounded with the malfunctioning state and Islamist grassroots organisational scheme, contributed to the Islamist mobilisation in Turkey. This leads to the conclusion that socioeconomic factors provide rather a partial explanation to the rise of political Islam in Turkey. Yavuz (2003) adopts a constructivist approach in his analysis of the Islamic movements (e.g. Nakşibendi Sufi Order, Nur movement, Neo-Nur movement, National Outlook movement) and their political repercussions. More recently (2009) he has provided a more diversified account of the JDP by including the socioeconomic bases of the JDP in his analysis. He highlights the fact that owners of small businesses and industrialists, shopkeepers, master craftsmen, semi-industrialist farmers, and owners of construction firms make up the JDP’s base. Similarly, Hale and Özbudun (2010) add the social bases of the JDP to their analysis of JDP’s first ruling tenure (2002–2007).
This book focuses on acquiring a deeper insight into the social bases of the JDP. To do so it looks to what extent long-, medium-, and short-term economic factors and the changes in social structures they ignited contributed to the JDP’s rise in 2002. More precisely, the book considers the economic decisions from the beginning of the Republic up to 2002 and how they led to changes in social structures in Turkish society and in their political demands. In addition to this account of the socioeconomic origins of the JDP, which constitutes the demand side, I also look at the supply side, the transformation of the political party system and parties as products of political and social cleavages. This dual analysis appears to contribute to the scholarly literature by elucidating the supply and demand mechanism behind JDP’s emergence.
In addition to the scholarly literature from the political Islam perspective, some scholars add different angles such as Europeanisation, democratisation, and/or state-military relations with political Islam. A number of contributions in this vein appear in a single-edited volume, Secular and Islamic Politics in Turkey: The Making of the Justice and Development Party (Cizre 2008). For example, Cizre’s (2008) volume explores the JDP’s place within the Turkish political system with respect to JDP’s policy agenda in civil-military relations, EU conditionality, human rights, and the evolution of political Islam. She argues that, despite the EU reform process that curtailed the military’s supremacy over Turkish politics, the Turkish army was still too powerful. In the same volume, Çınar (2008) argues that the JDP has used the EU project as a means to ease secularist restrictions on public expression of Islamic belief. He illustrates that the party used conditionality to restrict the political authority of the military. Another contribution to the same edited volume co-authored by Çınar and Duran (2008) discusses the historical evolution of political Islam and how Turkish Islamism differs from religious movements in other Islamic states. Çayır (2008) argues that a “self-critical Islam” that encourages Islamic actors to embrace both modern lifestyles and religiosity at individual level has replaced the Turkish Islamism of the 1970s and 1980s. Other scholars analyse the JDP, based on its policy agenda (e.g. economic and social agenda) following its consolidation in the party system. Amongst them, Uzgel and Duru (2009) have considered the JDP as the new political actor of the neoliberal transformation and compiled works written on the social, economic policy, legal aspect, domestic, and foreign political agenda of the party. In another publication Insight Turkey (2017), scholars have addressed the 15 years of the JDP, ela...