Pelin Ayan Musil

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Senior Researcher at Institute of International Relations Prague

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-histor...

This book analyzes the transformation of ethnic and religious political parties in Turkey with special focus on their role in the country’s democratization and regime changes. Turkey went through a process of autocratization under the rule of the AKP government over the last two decades. Scholars question the structural, agent-centered and cultural...

Both Turkey and Tunisia have attracted significant attention regarding their democratization and religious politics. While Turkey was considered a successful case of blending Islam and democracy in the decade of 2000s, it plunged into autocratization in the following decade. Tunisia became the only Arab spring country to go through democratic trans...

Despite a growing body of literature on the advancement of autocratic tactics and toolkits in competitive authoritarian regimes (CARs), we lack sufficient knowledge on the strategies that the opposition builds against populist-authoritarian governments. Using two top autocratizing cases – Turkey and Hungary – this article singles out ‘transnational...

This article contributes to the growing body of literature on opposition coordination within competitive authoritarian regimes (CARs). Defining oppositional unity as the ability of key opposition parties to select one joint candidate for elections, it introduces the concept of an intermediary party that facilitates such unity. An intermediary party...

In 2016, The New York Times published a series of articles highlighting the rise of far-right political parties across Europe and their increasing electoral success. One article noted the coincidence between the electoral gains of the far right and a series of migrant crises, growing economic inequality, disillusionment with the European Union, and...

This article contributes to the literature focusing on the relationship between crises and populism. It argues that the timing, the crisis type, and the contextual factor of whether populists are in power, matter for changes in the discursive strategies of populists and their ability to turn crises into opportunity structures. Guided by the constru...

This article explains the survival of the AKP in Turkey’s late stage of autocratization (2017-present) through its strategy of shifting the primary drivers of competition from individual parties to pre-electoral alliances. Confronted with a decline in popular support in 2015 June elections, the article argues that the AKP created uneven patterns of...

In the early 2000s, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) rose to power by contesting the electoral dominance of pro-Kurdish parties in the Kurdish-majority provinces of Turkey. The existing literature has accounted for the AKP's popularity among the Kurdish population by providing three distinct perspectives: economic performance, the use of ‘Is...

This chapter aims to empirically demonstrate the theoretical framework of this book through a process-tracing, comparative case study approach. Combining interview evidence collected from the AKP and pro-Kurdish activists in the years 2007, 2011 and 2018 as well as the media statements of the party leaders and liberal intellectuals, it argues that...

This chapter provides the background context of the formation of the Islamist-successor AKP and the Kurdish-successor HDP from a comparative perspective. It shows that both parties were formed as the consequence of contexts that made their predecessors publicly more visible, legitimate actors that were able to build ties with different social group...

This concluding chapter aims to shed light on the pivotal question of why the religious and ethnic successor parties—and the organized support they received against the autocratic practices in the country did not end up with democratization, but on the contrary, further autocratized the regime. It reviews the existing explanations on the collapse o...

This chapter introduces the research question, rationale, theoretical framework as well as the data and methods used in this book. The research question is framed as follows: ‘What are the common factors that led to the emergence of the Islamist-successor (i.e. the AKP) and Kurdish-successor (i.e. the HDP) parties in Turkey, both of which transgres...

This chapter addresses how it was possible for the AKP and the HDP, during the elections that they extraordinarily succeeded, to frame the state elite as despotic when the state relatively had all the power to shut these parties down like it did earlier. It asks what kind of discursive opportunity structures enabled these parties deliver such publi...

This article presents the case of Turkey within the framework of this special issue entitled "On Islamist Parties and the Inclusion-Moderation Hypothesis". I argue that rather than a distinction between the concepts of "tactical" and "ideological" moderation that the literature talks about, a distinction between the concepts of an "inclusionary-pop...

Turkey has experienced a heterogeneous collection of social movements and protests. While scholars have given substantial attention to coups in this context, it remains unclear if the Turkish Armed Forces have ever defected in favour of civilian mobilization during periods of political instability. In large-N databases on defection, cases in Turkey...

While the literature on rebel-to-party transformation focused on formation of parties at the end of civil wars, in this study, we address the phenomenon of a political party that co-exists alongside a rebel group during a lengthy civil war. We define this party as a ‘pro-rebel party,’ which is constrained by the rebel group but adheres to the legal...

The 2013 Gezi protests still remain the largest to have arisen in the AKP era of governance in Turkey. In light of substantial interdisciplin-ary attention attributed to this case, this study analyses a previously neglected, yet salient activist strategy known as fraternization that arose during protester-police interactions. We argue that when ent...

The Turkish party law (TPL) has thus far been studied only in isolation. We do not have any knowledge of where it stands compared to other party laws. This study fills this gap by comparing the TPL with other European party laws. It codes the TPL according to the categories of party regulation that exists in the current literature and finds that th...

Although the literature on party politics has significantly advanced both methodologically and theoretically in recent years, the study of political parties in Turkey has been noticeably disconnected and lacking from such conversations. This book evaluates well-established theories and trends in exiting party politics literature and relates them to...

This chapter assesses the cartel party theory in the context of Turkey, showing the way it can be utilized in explaining democratic recessions.

No abstract is available for this article.

While Turkey lacks significant levels of public support fromthe Czech Republic in its EU bid, the existing studies of European public opinion on the question of Turkey do not bring any reasonable explanation as to why this can be so. To shed light on this problem, this article offers an analytical framework derived from sociological and discursive...

In non-democratic parties, oppositional factions have difficulty making inroads to the top executive party organs. There are two consequences for these groups: party split or leadership removal. In the former case, the oppositional faction exits and establishes its own party. In the latter, the opposition succeeds in altering the balance of power b...

Conducting a comparative case study among four parties in the Turkish political system, this study shows how the variance in interest configurations and the power resources of local party activists constitute these changing patterns.

In Turkey, one of the major challenges that university education faces is the indifference of young people towards social issues. The aim of this article is to contribute to the practice of critical pedagogy by proposing that showing movies is an important critical teaching method with the power both to give pleasure to the students and to develop...

Authoritarianism within party structures is recognized as a central feature of all political parties in Turkey but used in a taken‐for‐granted manner. This article highlights the necessity to examine the power relationship between the central and local party actors and argues that the different incentive structures within political parties lead to...