Sebnem Gumuscu

Middlebury College · Department of Political Science

After decades of multiparty politics, Turkey is no longer a democracy. A theory-upending case, the country has descended into a competitive authoritarian regime under the Justice and Development Party ( Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi—AKP), despite rising income and education levels and strong links with the West. What accounts for democratic breakdown...

Turkey is one of the few countries in the region that has a long history of multi-party politics. The party system, despite occasional interventions from the military, as Sayari posits, remained one of Turkey's major political institutions since 1946. In 2002, however, Turkey entered a new period, and the party system in the country has changed dra...

Unlike many other countries in the Middle East, Turkey has a long history of multi-party politics, with free and fair elections dating back to the 1950s. Such qualities allowed the country to meet the basic democratic criteria, despite occasional promissory coups, and Turkey consistently featured among exceptional democracies in the region, alongsi...

The first Islamist parties to come to power through democratic means in the Muslim world were those in Turkey, Tunisia, and Egypt. The Justice and Development Party (AKP) won the 2002 election in Turkey, and Ennahda (Renaissance Party) in Tunisia and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt were both elected in the wake of the Arab uprisings of 2010/11. Yet...

This article argues that the AKP has dismantled secularism in Turkey through stealth Islamization. Defined as incremental and top-down Islamization of social and political life, this process entails four processes: (1) institutionalization of Turkish Islamist political imaginary; (2) redesigning the Diyanet and public education system to spread Isl...

Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan won a third presidential term in May 2023 in a close race that constituted the opposition’s best chance ever to defeat the long-serving president at the polls. The election was neither free nor fair, but it was real. Erdoğan coupled sophisticated strategies with ethnoreligious themes to win the race against a backdrop...

This chapter unpacks internal dynamics of political parties and introduces a factional theory of party behavior. The central assertion is that political parties are factional coalitions with different perspectives on political issues. The aim herein is twofold. First, the chapter traces how individual preferences aggregate into group preferences in...

After 84 years of struggle, the Muslim Brotherhood rose to prominence in Egyptian politics in the wake of the Arab uprisings. On the night of his election, Mohamed Morsi promised to unite all Egyptians – Muslim and Christians, men and women – and to advance the revolutionary cause for democracy, human rights, and dignity. Over the next 365 days, ra...

After coming to power in 2002, the AKP in Turkey took the country on a roller coaster from democratic reforms to authoritarian retreat. Starting off as a “conservative democratic” party with liberal tendencies, the AKP pivoted back to majoritarianism over the years. This chapter aims to make sense of this drastic shift and offers an account of the...

The first Islamist parties to come to power through democratic means in the Muslim world were those in Turkey, Tunisia, and Egypt. The Justice and Development Party (AKP) won the 2002 election in Turkey, and Ennahda (Renaissance Party) in Tunisia and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt were both elected in the wake of the Arab uprisings of 2010/11. Yet...

What drives Islamists’ democratic commitments? Does modernization turn them into committed democrats? Or do institutions rein in their authoritarian tendencies through political socialization and democratic habituation? This chapter critically reviews three theories that define the scholarly debate surrounding these questions while providing a hist...

This chapter synthesizes the similarities and differences among three Islamist parties – the AKP, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Ennahda – in power and shows how internal dynamics matter more in charting their democratic commitments than do external forces. The chapter then assesses how far this theory travels to other cases of Islamist parties and re...

Only a few weeks after Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire, Ennahda returned to Tunisia from exile. The same year Ennahda won Tunisia’s first free and fair elections in its history. On the night of the election, Rached Ghannouchi, the leader of Ennahda, vowed to uphold the revolutionary goals of building a free and prosperous Tunisia. And his part...

On 31 March 2019 Turkish voters ended the Islamist local governance in the country’s largest cities after 25 years and handed the ruling AKP its most serious electoral defeat since its rise to power in 2002. The article explores the electoral strategies of major parties in the local election, offers a comparative analysis of the results, and discus...

Turkey has switched to a presidential system via a referendum held in April 2017 that will take full effect after the 2019 presidential elections. Turkish presidentialism increases the prominence of the executive at the expense of the legislative branch and concentrates power in the office of the president. Executive aggrandizement will deepen ideo...

The most recent global wave of democratic reversal is marked by executive takeovers. Politically motivated interventions in domestic markets aimed at restructuring the underlying power dynamics in society have been part and parcel of these takeovers. This article investigates the new political economy behind the AKP’s competitive authoritarian rule...

Following four elections in three years, on 16 April 2017 Turkish voters once again went to the polls - this time under the emergency law established after the failed coup attempt of July 2016 - to vote on constitutional amendments aimed at replacing the existing parliamentary system with an executive presidency. This article reviews the content of...

Following four elections in three years, on 16 April 2017 Turkish voters once again went to the polls - this time under the emergency law established after the failed coup attempt of July 2016 - to vote on constitutional amendments aimed at replacing the existing parliamentary system with an executive presidency. This article reviews the content of...

Since its transition to a multiparty system in 1950, Turkey has witnessed six attempted military interventions in politics. Of these, four (1960, 1971, 1980, and 1997) were successful and two (1962 and 1963) failed. The latest coup attempt made world news late on the evening of 15 July 2016, when fighting broke out in Istanbul and Ankara and it see...

Since the Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002 Turkey has undergone double regime transitions. First, tutelary democracy ended; second, a competitive authoritarian regime has risen in its stead. We substantiate this assertion with specific and detailed evidence from 2015 election cycles, as well as from broader trends in Turkis...

As we have shown in the previous chapters, Turkey, in the last decades, has been undergoing significant changes and transformations lived and felt in each and every sphere of life. On the one hand, Turkey has embraced a proactive foreign policy, and its regional power role in world politics has become more important with its identity as a modern se...

Modern Turkish history is one of change and continuity insofar as it involves radical changes and ruptures alongside significant continuities across different periods. This chapter defines the nature of transformation in the Turkish context starting with the early republican period and provides a historical and theoretical background to the most re...

The aim of this chapter is to discuss the sources of AKP’s electoral hegemony with respect to the four transformational processes which have started at different points after the establishment of the republic and continue to the present in Turkey. We also analyze the ways in which AKP’s hegemony shaped these processes as well as corresponding socia...

The history of Turkish modernity is a history of transformation along four dimensions: modernization, democratization, globalization, and Europeanization. The process of globalization starting in the 1980s has played a particularly important role in challenging the state-centric modernization established in 1923 by the republican elite. Accordingly...

Antonio Gramsci’s famous statement that “the old is dying and the new cannot be born: in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear,” though penned as early as the 1930s, captures and expresses eloquently the transformative and ambivalent nature of the world in which we live. 1 The Middle East and North Africa in the aftermath of th...

As we have already demonstrated in the previous chapters globalization has played an important role in shaping the course of Turkey’s transformation in recent decades. Specifically, we have discussed how economic globalization starting in the 1980s affected Turkish society and politics by enlarging and empowering particular socioeconomic groups. We...

As we have shown in the previous chapter, with the onset of globalization Turkish modernization has faced significant challenges manifested in the rise of identity politics. While the Kurdish question constituted a crucial front through which Turkish state-centric modernization was challenged, so has the politicization of Islamic identity since the...

This chapter discusses the implications of AKP’s hegemony for democratic consolidation in Turkey and argues that the power of the AKP, stemming from its transformative role in Turkey’s modernization and globalization, has not paved the way to consolidation of democracy, despite the initial democratic reforms the party implemented in its first term...

Turkey’s complex transformation has rendered Turkish domestic and international politics increasingly intertwined and interdependent. No other issue manifests this interdependence more than the Kurdish issue. The Kurdish issue has been a central aspect of Turkey’s transformation and a critical challenge before Turkish modernization and democratizat...

In the Turkish national elections of 12 June 2011 the ruling Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi (AKP, Justice and Development Party) registered an exceptional success in Turkish democracy. For the first time, an incumbent party had managed to increase its votes for three elections in a row and established its predominance. This article argues that the AKP,...

This article argues that socioeconomic changes within Islamist constituencies are critical parts of understanding of how moderate Islamists emerge and succeed. The diverging paths of economic reform in Turkey and Egypt have generated different effects on the Islamist constituencies in these two countries. Economic liberalization has played both a c...

Historically, the closure of a party is a common phenomenon in Turkish politics. While the recent case against the governing Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi, AKP) was reminiscent of this trend, the decision of the Constitutional Court demonstrated that there are changes in the dynamics of the Turkish political structure. A...