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Authoritarian Party Structures in Turkey: A Comparison of the Republican People's Party and the Justice and Development Party
Turkish Studies
Abstract
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 different types of party authoritarianism. Comparing the incentive structures of the Republican People's Party (CHP) and the Justice and Development Party (AKP), the article concludes that the CHP is close to an oligarchic type of authoritarianism whereas the AKP is close to a hegemonic type of authoritarianism.
... Turkish political parties, lacking strong grassroots connections, rely heavily on leadership to engage voters, centralizing power within the party hierarchy (Turan 2003). This top-down organization allows leaders to control nominations, promotions, party programmes and resource distribution, ensuring high party discipline and alignment with leadership (Ayan 2010;Gençkaya and Kabasakal 2024;Kabasakal 2014;Turan 2011). Leaders reinforce discipline by punishing or expelling members who deviate from the party line (Ayan 2010;Özbudun 2007). ...
... This top-down organization allows leaders to control nominations, promotions, party programmes and resource distribution, ensuring high party discipline and alignment with leadership (Ayan 2010;Gençkaya and Kabasakal 2024;Kabasakal 2014;Turan 2011). Leaders reinforce discipline by punishing or expelling members who deviate from the party line (Ayan 2010;Özbudun 2007). This centralized authority is further entrenched by the closed-list proportional representation system, where party leadership controls candidate selection and rankings on electoral lists, and voters cast ballots for parties rather than individual candidates (Gençkaya and Kabasakal 2024). ...
This study examines how formal institutions in hybrid regimes, particularly presidentialism, party organization and electoral rules, actively foster and sustain clientelistic networks, leading to particularistic outcomes. While existing literature highlights the weakening of formal institutions and pervasive clientelism as drivers of democratic breakdown, this study uses the concept of neopatrimonialism to analyse how formal institutions themselves consolidate patron–client relationships to maintain power and stability. Focusing on Turkey, the analysis demonstrates that the institutional incentive structure consolidates the president's role as the central ‘patron’, controlling resources and offices, and encourages clientelistic networks to coalesce around the presidency. The discretionary allocation of resources through patron–client relationships sustains neopatrimonial authority as long as clients' loyalty is rewarded. However, this governance increases clients' dependence on the patron, binding them at the expense of representation and responsiveness. The analysis offers insights into how such institutional configurations contribute to authoritarianism and particularistic governance in hybrid regimes.
... Studies have indicated that there are 'oligarchic tendencies,' 'overly centralised structures,' and 'highly disciplined party leaderships' (Turan 1988;Özbudun 2000). The leading two political parties for the 2023 general elections; AKP and CHP, are historically and inherently deemed as authoritarian, the AKP party observed as displaying a hegemonic form of authoritarianism and CHP deemed as displaying an oligarchic form for authoritarianism (Ayan 2010). ...
... Due to this, the administration of Kılıçdaroğlu has exerted revamping efforts into the party's ideological platform, as well as its institutional and structural composition, in an effort to convince the voting public that the party and its cadres are changing (Ciddi & Esen 2014). This came after large criticism to the previous and long-lasting Deniz Baykal administration (Ayan 2010), and its electoral stagnation by CHP party supporters. Kılıçdaroğlu had a difficult task on his hands and displayed he was listening to the feedback, when he and his team took to work, reviving Atatürk's party. ...
This study is interested in the persuasive and compelling modalities used by advertisers in political campaign advertising images, applied to persuade and impact their audiences. In this respect, this research focuses on two political campaigns posters, chosen by a non-random sampling procedure, commissioned by the Republic of Turkey current ruling party, and their main opposition, during the lead-up of the 2023 General Elections in Turkey. In this endeavour, a multimodal discourse analysis is utilised due to the study involving language and semiotic processes in a visual medium, serving as a foundation for the examination of the information gathered by Kress & van Leeuwen in 1996. In an effort to interpret the representational, interactional, and compositional meanings provided by the various parts of the chosen images, three metafunctions will be used. The results demonstrate that the visual grammar and multimodality-based theoretical framework may be adapted to the discourse of political advertisements. It was additionally found that the framework identified representational, interactional, and compositional processes, which contribute to the social interpretations of the images.
... Six cases of factional rivalry-three representing party split and three representing leadership removal-are selected from Turkey for two reasons: First, the Turkish context is a suitable setting to study non-democratic parties. Scholarship on Turkish parties acknowledges that the internal decision-making mechanisms of parties exclude oppositional factions (Ayan, 2010;Özbudun, 2000: 83;Sayarı, 1976;Turan, 1988: 65). Second, the focus on one single country makes the analysis suitable for a so-called most similar systems design: Coming from the same political setting, selected parties share a number of similar characteristics-they are subject to the same political history, electoral rules, parliamentary system and a political culture in which military interventions are common to observe as a distinctive type of external event on the party system. ...
... The CHP-2010 case shows that Baykal pursued a strongly personalistic leadership style in candidate selection, programmatic or ideological debates (Ayan, 2010;Ayata and Ayata, 2007). CHP statutes granted a high degree of power to the party leader, stating that 'party leader is the head of the whole party organization' and 'the central executive board'. ...
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 by removing the leader and the party goes through change. This article suggests that the level of power concentration within the dominant faction matters for the type of outcome in factional rivalries. If the power is concentrated in the hands of a small elite, the divisions within the elite can help the oppositional faction remove the party leader. If the power resides only with a single leader, the oppositional faction is likely to lose the struggle against the dominant faction and decide to exit. This study explores the causal mechanisms involved by comparing six non-democratic parties from Turkey.
... Although the Turkish Political Parties Law empowers political parties to determine their candidate nomination procedures, the process generally remains under the supervision and tight control of the party leadership and central executive committees (Ozbudun 2002). In her seminal study, for instance, Ayan (2010) conceptualised the intra-party authoritarianism of the CHP as oligarchic, where the power of the central party is maintained by the supply of negative incentives to local party members even though they are ideologically aligned with the party. ...
... Growing over-confident from its electoral victories, the AKP drifted towards a fully majoritarian conception of democracy after its second tenure following the 2007 national elections, and further deteriorated to electoral authoritarianism in the ensuing years (Özbudun 2014;Esen & Gumuscu 2016). Later years of the AKP rule can be characterised by growing oppression under the AKP hegemony in the state and political affairs (Cinar 2019), de-institutionalisation of the party with Mr. Erdoğan's personalistic rule (Yardımcı-Geyikçi & Yavuzyilmaz 2022;Ayan 2010), and exclusionary right-wing populism (Erçetin & Boyraz 2023;Cinar 2024;Yabanci 2016). This has been especially the case when Turkey transitioned from a parliamentary regime to super-presidentialism in 2017. ...
The 2024 local elections in Turkey have surprised many domestic and international observers alike as the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has faced its first nation-wide defeat since its meteoric rise in Turkish politics in 2002. The main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), has come out as the leading party in the election and grabbed most of the metropolitan municipalities including all of the 5 most populous and industrious cities, i.e. İstanbul, Ankara, İzmir, Bursa, and Adana. The New Welfare Party (YRP), an ultra-conservative, Islamist party, has become the third party in the election, gaining seats and support in many parts of the country. This article argues that what the 2024 local elections could bring about for the Turkish democracy still hangs in balance as the AKP’s authoritarian policies seem to continue, whereas the opposition camp appears to gather major momentum and energy for the upcoming national elections in 2028-or even before.
... See Avital Livny (2020). Also see Ayan-Musil (2010). ...
This article reviews the existing body of scholarship and draws on original qualitative research that compares the party organizations of four major Turkish parties. By doing so, it highlights the causal relationships -mediated by political agency– between socioeconomic structures and party politics. Clientelism remained part and parcel of Turkish party politics and state-society relations since the transition to multi-party system in mid-20th century through AKP governments. However, important changes occurred in terms of who effectively supplied it, how, and to whom on the basis of broader socioeconomic transformations of Turkey. Political parties did not equally or homologously adjust and respond to social change. The AKP’s successful organizational responses to socioeconomic transformations had important implications for Turkey’s political regime. In pre-AKP clientelism, the state and powerful local notables within parties were key to the supply and distribution of clientelistic benefits. We argue that this contributed to the emergence of electoral democracy under tutelage of military-bureaucratic state actors who faced weak resistance from a fragmented civilian political class. In turn, during AKP governments, the locus of patronage shifted from state to party and from local notables to the AKP party machine: national machine politics. This helped the party to pacify military-bureaucratic tutelage and achieve dominance in party politics, but, the lack of a categorically pro-democratic party ideology and the paradoxes of national machine politics together led the party to transform Turkey to an electoral autocracy instead of developing democracy. Further, the AKP reshaped the Turkish state, which on the surface began to look like a party-state. By revising and providing nuance to this observation, we discuss the emergence of a popular broker-state mediating between national and local state institutions and local communities through its control over resources. We maintain that all these changes facilitated also the party’s internal decay. This generates important opportunities for opposition parties, who however continue to rely heavily on pre-AKP forms of clientelistic politics. Without refashioning their party organizations and party-voter linkages, they may not be able to defeat the AKP electorally, and even if they are, they may not be able to secure successful democratization. They also face difficulties of altering how they form clientelistic linkages with society without controlling state resources at national level.
... This is particularly true for the 2000s. The CHP benefited from a multi-party competition at the local level, instead of a two-party competition with the ruling AKP during this Table 7. Key Political Indicators for the Baykal era (1992-2010). 1995199920022007 7.81 (3.94) [1.3-19.6] 15.88 (7.36) [2.5-32.8] ...
This article employs regressive and spatial analyses to understand the correlates of the CHP's electoral support from the first competitive elections in 1950 to the present. We find that despite some continuities in its constituency, the CHP's voter base has changed significantly with regards to key political and social dynamics such as the Kurdish vote, effective number of parties, and urbanization. The findings give credence to the role of political leadership as well as the evolutionary capability of the party, both of which can have important implications regarding the future electoral trajectory of the party and of Turkey's political regime.
... In principle, Atatürk accepted party competition. However he opposed the possibility of competition leading group interest at the expense of the "general interest" (Ayan, 2010;199). Thus, the CHP authoritarian regime came to dominate the political system, committing itself to upholding the general interest of the Republic, e.g. ...
http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/98940/1/amaluda.pdf
... Thus, the only option for the opposition parties to stay in the political competition, and win ground, would 2 The CHP is a center-left party with a secular and Kemalist identity and a strong proponent of a return to the parliamentarian system in Turkey. It had been close to the military establishment, which acted as the guardian of the Turkish Republic until the recent transformation to presidential rule (Ayan 2010). The IP is a centrist-nationalist party led by a charismatic leader, Meral Akşener, who founded the party together with a group of defectors from the Nationalist Action Party (Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi, MHP) in late 2017 and elites from former center-right parties (Parti 2019). ...
This article offers an institutionalist assessment of the more recent chapters of political opposition in Erdoğan’s Turkey. There is good reason to suppose that the institutional features of a given regime can explain the performance of opposition parties to a significant extent. That said, the case of Turkey provides impressive evidence that there are striking limits to institutionalizing political predominance, to undermining political oppositions by institutional means, and to explaining the performance of opposition parties with the prevailing institutional resources and constraints. Specifically, attempts at institutionalizing a predominant power status carry particular risks of generating inverse effects, including increased political vulnerability. However, there are no automatic effects. Rather, as the Turkish experience suggests, reasonably vigorous actors to become politically relevant must seize the particular (if usually limited) opportunities arising from advanced institutional autocratization.
... Our argument is mainly built on the quantitative analysis of voting patterns, however, qualitative evidence support our argument and may need further research. First, there is evidence that the AKP is a hierarchically organized, centralized party, able and willing to devise rational strategies to expand its voter base (Arıkan 2016;Ayan 2010;Aydın-Düzgit 2012;Lancaster 2014). Partisan attachment in Turkey is not as weak as in many developing democracies, but still, voters may be susceptible to cues by social networks (Erişen 2013). ...
Electoral geography is mostly concerned with the geographic distribution of voters and their attributes. We add a new argument to the discussion about electoral geography: that parties pursue geographically oriented stronghold strategies. Parties win electoral provinces, transform them into strongholds, and then use the stronghold´s resources to systematically target nearby provinces. We illustrate our argument with a quantitative analysis of the rise of the Turkish Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP), utilizing a spatial diffusion perspective. Our analysis shows that the AKP has electoral gains in a given ‘receiver’ province if they have performed well in other ‘sender’ provinces in previous elections. This relation is moderated by geographical distance: only past electoral success in nearby ‘sender’ provinces has an impact on the electoral fortune of the AKP in the ‘receiver’ province. Thus, our argument is that geography matters and it channels party strategies.
... Youth-oriented activities are organized by the Municipal Social and Cultural Work Unit, and the vice-mayor who took the initiative is the one responsible for the unit. Regarding the youth policy of the political party in office at this particular municipality: even if Turkish political parties are highly centralized organizations (Ayan 2010;Özbudun 2006;Kalaycıoglu 2001), and all the branches adopt the same party program, which also mean a common youth policy at least on paper, at the local level, we observed that they do not necessarily provide similar youth-oriented services. Even different local municipalities in the same city, run by the same political party, do not necessarily provide same services. ...
Youth work is a very recent field in Turkey and the evolution of the field has been very much influenced by the European institutions, especially with the European Union candidacy process of Turkey. Youth work in Turkey can be analyzed in three different layers since the central government, local government (municipalities) and civil society organization all have youth work activities. During our Horizon 2020 PARTISPACE research project, we conducted ethnographic research to shed light on the local characteristics of youth work in a central Anatolian city in Turkey. The cases we discuss in the scope of this paper based on our ethnographic research includes two youth centers, one run by a central government agency, the Ministry of Youth and Sports, the other by a local municipality run by the party of opposition. The study reveals the influence of local dynamics and political competition in the development of youth policy and youth work. Our research demonstrates that, even if youth work is not a priority in the public policy agenda, it has become an object of political competition in Turkey.
... Schematic representation of similarities between the four viewpoints IJCMA 28,2 differences within these parties, even in authoritarian ones. This is especially the case for AKP as this party's ex-leader, Erdogan, is highly authoritarian and does not allow his party members to talk freely (Ayan, 2010). In line with the conflict resolution literature that suggests that there often are different perspectives about the conflict within each conflicting party (Cheldelin et al., 2003;Kelman and Fisher, 2003), this might also be the case within a single political party. ...
Purpose
Exploring the understandings of conflict held by Members of Parliament (MPs) provides a meaningful picture of a conflict in a particular society. The aim of the study is to explore the Kurdish conflict understandings among MPs in Turkey.
Design/methodology/approach
The current research used Q methodology, which is a suitable method to identify socially shared perspectives and to identify intra- and inter-group differences, and Entman’s (1993) frame analysis to explore subjective understandings of the Kurdish conflict. Data were collected from 23 MPs from four political parties.
Findings
The analysis revealed four qualitatively distinct viewpoints: Turkish Nationalist view, Social Democratic view, Conservative-Religious view and Pro-Kurdish view.
Originality/value
This study contributes to the understanding of political parties’ perspectives on the Kurdish conflict in Turkey by representing each political party’s priorities and concerns. The meaning of these priorities and concerns, implications for conflict resolution and the usefulness of the Q methodology for exploring conflict understandings are also discussed.
... This connects to another Kemalist institutional feature: the law on political parties. The law prevents intra-party democracy, feeding authoritarianism in three ways (Ayan 2010). first, it makes the parties dependent on state resources, triggering cartelisation in order to avoid that other parties get public funding. ...
Turkey’s recent drift towards authoritarianism has taken many by surprise. Once hailed as a democratic model for the Middle East, the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) has increasingly islamised Turkish society, jailed journalists, monopolised the judicial power and taken over the state apparatus. This article discusses the party’s behaviour, contending that Turkey’s prospects for democratisation are totally dependent on AKP’s choices as the dominant actor in Turkish politics and society. Using a theoretical framework that combines rational choice institutionalism and the role of elites in democratisation processes, the article argues that AKP’s particular characteristics and the institutional setting that influences them makes democratisation a seemingly impossible outcome. Given that EU accession and the necessary domestic reforms to meet conditionality, namely the Copenhagen criteria, equate a democratisation process, the main conclusion is that Turkey’s prospects for accession under AKP remain grim for purely domestic causes.
Afetler, her ne kadar ilk bakışta fen ve doğa bilimlerinin inceleme alanına müdahilmiş gibi görünse de hem toplumsal kurumları etkileyen hem de bu kurumlardan etkilenen sosyal olaylardır. Buna karşın, Türkiye’de hayatın büyük bir alanın kaplayan bir kurum olarak siyasetin afetler ile ilişkileri Türkçe literatürde görece az incelenmiş bir konudur. Bu çalışmada, afet-siyaset ilişkilerinin Türk siyasetinde nasıl bir görünüm aldığı keşfedici biçimde incelenerek Türkçe literatüre bir katkı verilmesi hedeflenmiştir. Bu amaçla Türkiye’de 1999 depremlerinden itibaren meydana gelen en ölümcül on afette siyasal aktörlerin bu afetlere nasıl tepkiler verdiği ve birbirlerine ilişkin nasıl nitelemelerde bulundukları yorumsayıcı içerik analiziyle incelenmiştir. Çalışmanın sonucunda Türkiye’de yaşanan afetlerin iktidar-muhalefet ilişkilerinde yer alan çoğu zaman da açık algılamaları daha şiddetli biçimde ortaya çıkardığı, iktidarın muhalefeti “sorumsuz ve makyavelist”, muhalefetin ise iktidarı “beceriksiz ama baskıcı” temalarıyla algıladıkları görülmüştür. Bu bağlamda, Türk siyasetinde yer alan grupların ilişkilerinin afetler karşısında nasıl bir kırılganlık meydana getirebileceği tartışılmıştır.
This article assesses the prospects of social democracy in Turkey in light of two prominent debates regarding social democracy: the challenge of populism and the proper balance between a politics of redistribution and a politics of recognition. By focusing on the Republican People’s Party (CHP), it shows that the main problem the party faces is to find ways of addressing the issues of recognition and redistribution. Success in addressing these issues would provide an effective alternative to the populist agenda of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and build channels for participatory democracy and institutions of accountability. We argue that social democracy, with its legacy of democratic rule and institutions, can serve as a significant anchoring point in such an effort. We point out, however, why current social, institutional, political, and cultural factors make the CHP’s task of pursuing a social democratic agenda in Turkey particularly difficult.
This chapter is primarily concerned with developments and changes in executive-legislative relations in Turkey with particular reference to the debate on parliamentarism versus presidentialism in Turkish politics. The constitutional referendum in 2017 installed the presidential system with a highly centralized executive structure. The new system presents a form of majoritarian view of democracy where separation of powers and judicial independence is subject to review, due to the relatively weakness of checks and balances in the systems. This chapter provides insights to highly debated transformation process in Turkish governmental system.KeywordsConstitutionThe justice and development partyParliamentary systemPresidential systemTurkeyTurkish Grand Assembly
Despite great advances in the last decades, there is an enduring gender gap in a majority of the countries. Gender is prevalent in all aspects of life, and it is impossible to avoid gender roles. The choices regarding gender roles are threefold: Accept them, reject them, or have an ambivalent stand. When voters grow incongruous with their parties, they look for an alternative which is ideologically closer to them. However, evaluating this vote shift without the full effect of gender will provide an incomplete picture of electoral politics. I theorize that when voters are faced with female candidates or female party leaders, their assessment of gender roles will be a deciding factor for whether the intended vote shift will be realized. I apply this extended theory of ideological and gender role congruity to a high gender gap context, Turkey, utilizing district level electoral data. Taking into account the spatial dependence of factors that affect voting behaviour, I empirically demonstrate that for two ideologically opposing parties, the salience of gender politics through the ranking of female candidates on the closed-lists and presence of national female leadership affected their vote share in line with my theoretical expectations in the 2018 general election.
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 only Ennahda could be said to have fulfilled its democratic promise, with both the Turkish and Egyptian governments reverting to authoritarianism. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork in three countries, Sebnem Gumuscu explains why some Islamist governments adhered to democratic principles and others took an authoritarian turn following electoral success. Using accessible language, Gumuscu clearly introduces key theories and considers how intra-party affairs impacted each party's commitment to democracy. Through a comparative lens, Gumuscu identifies broader trends in Islamist governments and explains the complex web of internal dynamics that led political parties either to advance or subvert democracy.
Why do so many regimes remain competitive authoritarian? This article argues that institutional path dependence explains the persistence of competitive authoritarian regimes in which electoral competition exists, but is unfair. The weakness of institutions regulating free and fair interparty competition, like multi-candidate elections, a constitution and statutes safeguarding fundamental rights, and intraparty competition, like intraparty democracy, is path-dependent and self-reinforcing. In settings where competition is partly free and fair, ruling elites have an incentive to combine democratic and undemocratic laws and policies to defeat counterelites and neutralize intraparty competitors. The likely long-term outcome is a vicious cycle of limited democratization, competitive authoritarian regime formation, and competitive authoritarian regime consolidation. I assess the argument by tracing the historical trajectory of reforms on constitutionalism, civil liberties, and multi-candidate competition in post-1950 Turkey, where the limits on interparty and intraparty competition have been reproduced in remarkable historical continuity.
Do the Turkish parliamentary committees exhibit gendered appointment practices? If so, what are the driving factors behind women's limited representation in some committees? Previous studies find a division of labor in committees based on the perceived gender roles: women legislators are over-represented in low-prestige committees with “feminine” themes such as family, health, and education, whereas they are under-represented in strategically key policymaking committees. These studies —mostly on Western democracies— explain this gender bias with the appointment practices of the conservative right-wing parties. Using an original dataset of appointments between 2002 and 2020, this paper examines the partisan effects on the under- and over-representation of women on certain committees in the Turkish context. We find that all parties except the small left-wing Peoples' Democratic Party (PDP) perform in a similarly biased way. We argue that parliamentary committees are gendered institutional spaces greatly affected by the institutional culture of political parties. Even though institutional culture is mostly shaped by ideological stances, political parties are still among institutional spaces where ideologies of masculinity are effectively shaping power relations. We conclude that institutionalizing mechanisms that enhance agential capacities and practices at the party level are vital for gender equality within the political sphere.
Despite the strong contagion effect in the Turkish party system for the adoption of candidate gender quotas and a commitment to promote women’s recruitment for a more gender-balanced parliament, the record of quota implementation by the leading quota parties has been mixed. The prevailing gaps between the numbers of female candidates and the actual numbers of women elected from the party lists, in a highly competitive electoral process, also reveals a precarious context for women’s nomination due to stagnant and sexist institutional settings and gendered recruitment dynamics. Ideological differences among the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) which implements a soft quota, the social democratic Republican People’s Party (CHP) which adopted a formalized party quota, and the left-wing Kurdish-nationalist People’s Democracy Party (HDP) which has recently adopted a parity objective, partially account for differences in quota implementation. The chapter also underlines inter-party differences in terms of the gendered formal and informal institutional dynamics during candidate selection, which places the HDP ahead of others in terms of nominating and electing more women. In contrast, the more fluid context of a nomination process controlled by male-dominated leadership and party selectors, absent or weakly endorsed quota rules and sanctions, and the conventional status of the women’s branches, continue to hamper effective implementation within the AKP and the CHP.
This chapter argues that Turkish democracy has swung from democratic improvement to retreat over the past two decades under the populist and autocratic rule of consecutive Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi—AKP) governments. It offers a holistic perspective that encompasses deteriorating political indicators versus a popular determination to keep the country on the democratic track, while also considering changes in foreign policy. To this end, the chapter first unpacks the structural vectors of democratic retreat in terms of domestic change in authority structures, namely the removal of military tutelage, the rise of populism and authoritarian capitalism; and second, it identifies Turkish public support for democracy through a hierarchical analysis of World Values Survey (Waves 3–7) data at individual level and V-Dem data (1994–2019) at the aggregate level.
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 groups. The Turkish-Islam Synthesis (TIS) promoted by the state in the 1980s and a desecuritized environment for Kurdish identity during the Europeanization of Turkey in the 2000s provided a favorable setting for the Islamist and Kurdish parties—respectively to incorporate into the broader society. It was thanks to their predecessors’ socialization with other groups within these favorable settings that AKP and the HDP could receive the organized support of different social groups under certain discursive opportunity structures. This chapter also introduces the importance of policy-seeking and office-seeking goals of political parties in transition periods and discusses the initial party goals (policy-seeking, office-seeking or vote-seeking) for the AKP and the HDP upon their formation.
Golan-Nadir explores the second case study, the case of Turkey, which reveals an intriguing political phenomenon, namely, the ability of institutional designs to endure over time despite diverging preferences of the majority of the population. The Turkish Case—Turkey’s Formation of Secular State Institutions—begins with the examination of the Turkish institutional formation at state building (1923), while indicating that since statehood the Turkish marriage policy has been governed by a secular monopoly, which allowed civil marriage as the only statutory option. It shows it was initiated as part of the secular revolution at state building. Finally, the chapter demonstrates the legislative stagnation on marriage policy in the seven decades since Turkey established a democratic political system, as reflected through TBMM law-making and other parliamentary procedures.
The internet has been praised as a tool that would increase political participation and enhance dialogue between politicians and the public. In fact, the widespread use of social media has turned the internet into a valuable communication channel for both individuals and organizations. Notably, it presented many opportunities for politicians and political parties to reach their constituencies. However, studies on politicians’ social media behaviors reported that they were using social media for broadcasting official political positions and self-promotion. In addition, the social media has become a tool to extend traditional politics into the cyberspace where interaction and exchange between rival political groups are rare and not very productive. As a result, ideological homophily was reported as the most crucial predictor of network formation on social media for politicians. This study explored that finding by analyzing Twitter friendships and retweeting networks of Turkish politicians. It found that political interests were more influential in politicians’ social media networks than ideological homophily.
In this review article I classify the literature on the Turkish political regime during Justice and Development Party rule as two waves of studies, and a potential third wave. The first wave was prevalent at least until the Gezi uprisings in 2013. I argue that, in this wave, the main debate was between two rival and largely culturalist perspectives with conceptual toolkits that tended to interpret regime change through the lens of social transformations. I also maintain that scholarly works written from the hegemonic perspective of this wave, utilizing center–periphery and state–society dichotomies, and a narrow range of concepts from the democratization literature (from defective democracy to democratic consolidation), have misidentified/misinterpreted burgeoning autocratization in Turkey as democratization, albeit with problems. The Gezi uprisings brought to the fore already existing authoritarian features of the Turkish political regime and led to the second wave of studies. In the second wave, the focus was on naming Turkey’s new political regime as a diminished subtype of authoritarianism, and thick descriptions of different facets of Turkey’s new authoritarianism. Finally, I suggest that there is a need for a third wave that builds on recent studies and focuses on explaining Turkey’s autocratization process and democratic breakdown, as well as the impact of autocratization on other aspects of Turkish politics and society.
Delving into Turkey's political playing field, this book examines how an ethnic party increased its vote shares. The case study looks at the rise of the Kurdish party in Turkey's 2011 national elections in relation to the mainstream political parties' strategies.
The research explores the strategy of the dominant Justice and Development Party that garnered the majority in three consecutive elections, introduced a new political issue, and even initiated an opening process. Investigating the reasons behind why such a dominant party would put itself at risk with this bold strategy and why it still lost votes to the ethnic party in the process, the book traces Turkey's handling of the Kurdish issue. Combining a detailed analysis of election results, speeches, and social survey findings, the volume offers a novel approach and a rare example of the application of process-tracing methodology. Additionally, the study is one of the first to utilize unsupervised model of scaling texts on the ethnic issue dimension.
As the first systematic analysis of the Kurdish opening process, the book will be of interest to students and scholars researching in qualitative methodology, text analysis, ethnic and party politics, Turkey, and the Middle East.
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 the TPL is the third-most heavily regulated party law in Europe. While it is particularly keen on regulating the ‘activity and behavior’ and ‘programmatic identity’ of parties similar to Ukrainian and Spanish party laws, it is significantly behind in regulating the ‘party finance’ and ‘external oversight’ compared to other European countries. This article discusses the implications of these findings on contemporary Turkish politics, arguing that the TPL's thick definition of an ‘anti-system party’ contributes to the current democratic recession in Turkey.
The gender gap in national and local politics is an important problem in numerous countries. Two explanations for the deficit experienced by female politicians relate to demand for women’s representation by political parties and by voters. We argue that the gender gap stems from party-based limitations in local politics. Women do not compete in local politics because relevant parties do not nominate them. We present original data on mayoral candidates who ran in the 2009 and 2014 Turkish local elections. Our findings show that women are less likely to be nominated for office and reasons for this gap originate from party choices rather than lack of electoral support for women.
The theory of party institutionalization (PI) developed in classical party literature has been a crucial tool for analyzing political parties. This paper aims to introduce how alternative models have emerged in developing democracies, suggesting the main dimensions of PI (‘autonomy’ and ‘systemness’) are not always positively correlated like initially suggested. One of these coined the ‘trade-off’ model, represents a dilemma of leadership where one dimension needs to be traded off to enhance the other. This may occur in parties that have radically motivated activists. Strategic difficulties that it brings, affect ‘professionalization’ of parties and their survivability. The last model (the ‘non-democratic’ model) is an extreme version of the tade-off model and it occurs when ‘autonomy’ is maximized and ‘systemness’ is minimized – a phenomenon that occurs easier under dominant party systems. Last section of this paper focuses on a case study (Turkey) to illustrate these models using primary and secondary sources; theoretical works on parties, the Turkish party system, and empirical data relating to the Turkish case.
In electoral systems with closed party lists, it is argued that the importance of central party organisation increases at the expense of individual candidates' role in candidate nomination processes. This logic also underestimates individuals' electoral potential and focuses on individuals' allegiance to the leadership as the main asset for increasing their chances of being nominated. We argue that forming a party-list is a strategic decision based on the principle of furthering the interest of the party as a whole rather than rewarding individuals' commitment to the party and is conditional on inter-party competition. We conveyed an original dataset of candidate lists for major parties in Turkey's parliamentary elections between 1999 and 2015 and found empirical evidence for the significance of candidate lists as being used as strategic tools in inter-party electoral competition.
Liberal democracy is under pressure in a range of countries. To better understand these processes, this article compares patterns of argumentation in the Turkish presidentialization discourse with Schmittian political concepts. As a result, a strong component of identity politics has emerged in both cases, in which majority decisions are staged as the will of the people at the expense of the protection of fundamental rights and power sharing. In detail, it is shown how anti-liberal, parliamentary-critical arguments are placed at the centre of holistic, identity-based models of democracy and played off against the liberal idea of limited government by the protection of fundamental rights and the separation of powers.
A large body of literature has focused on potential causes and consequences of candidate nomination procedures. One of the received wisdoms in this literature is that loyalty to the party in centralized systems and personal vote-earning attributes in decentralized systems rank in priority for representatives’ career prospects. However, the determinants of candidate nomination in countries with centralized nomination procedures have been significantly undertheorized, due in part to the implicit assumption that party loyalty outweighs any other factor in determining career decisions. We close this gap by analyzing nomination and promotion decisions in Turkey, a closed-list PR system with highly centralized nomination procedures. We argue that representatives’ parliamentary performance such as parliamentary activeness and issue concentration influence parties’ nomination decisions. Utilizing original datasets of biographies of 1,100 MPs who served in parliament between 2002-2011, and over 18,000 parliamentary speeches and 1,040 bill co-sponsorships, we estimate empirical models that are explicitly derived from the underlying theoretical model and find evidence that party leaderships favor incumbents who make more speeches and who display higher issue concentration, while penalizing electorally safe incumbents who sought legislative influence through private members’ bills (PMBs). Results offer important implications for the study of candidate nomination and parliamentary behavior.
Der vorliegende Beitrag untersucht die dominierende Rolle türkischer Parteivorsitzender zwischen kommunaler und nationaler Politik. Er zeigt an Hand der Bereiche Mitgliederbeitritt, Delegiertenbestimmung und Besetzung parteiinterner Posten auf, aus welchen Quellen sich der große Einfluss der Parteivorsitzenden speist und welche Folgen dies für kommunale Politik hat. Der Artikel ist aus einer insgesamt neunmonatigen Feldforschungsphase (Interviews und teilnehmende Beobachtung) zur Kommunalpolitik der AKP in den zentralanatolischen Städten Konya und Eskişehir entstanden.
This article offers an analysis of the level of post-1980 Turkish party system institutionalization (PSI) and party system type. Although Turkey shares characteristics with both established and new democracies, no research has compared Turkey to both the established and new democracies with regard to PSI. Utilizing Croissant and Völkel’s four-dimensional index of PSI and Siaroff’s typology of party system type, this article shows that the level of Turkish PSI is higher than that of new democracies. The Turkish party system has not been fully institutionalized yet; however, the dominant party system introduces a certain degree of stability and predictability.
The comparative studies have shown that the skills, strategies, and choices of political leaders are critically important in explaining democratic transitions and consolidations as well as breakdowns.1 Turkey is one of the countries where political leaders have played a paramount influence in shaping the societal, political, and economic evolution of a country in its path to democracy. As the founding father of the Republic and the first political party—Republican People’s Party (CHP—Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi), Mustafa Kemal Atatürk initiated a cultural revolution, aimed at modernizing Turkey through a radical program of secularization and social change in the 1920s and the 1930s. His successor, İsmet İnönü, played the most important role in personally shaping the transition from an authoritarian one-party regime to multiparty politics and thus to electoral competition in the second half of the 1940s. The personalities of these two prominent leaders in Turkish political history, thus, have been the focus of many systematic analyses.2
This article aims to analyze the dynamics of the party system in Turkey by focusing on the AKP and construct an aggregate-level analysis of the electoral environment it operates in using regression models (1950–2011). Findings show strong patterns of continuity in the electoral geography of Turkey since the 1970s, mapping electoral strongholds of center-right, ultra-nationalist and pro-Islamist parties compared to those of the AKP. As of 2015, the AKP seems to have achieved a great deal of stabilization electorally and there is now handful of data that can identify and answer some of the questions related to the AKP, especially regarding its ideology, origins, electoral strength and appeal.
The 2002 general election marked a turning point in Turkish politics, result-ing in a massive overhaul of the party system, which weakened all existing parties tre-mendously. In this context, the newly formed AKP rose to power, launching Turkey into a new era of transformation. On the other end of the scale was the only opposition party that emerged rather successfully from the election: the CHP. Throughout the decade that followed, the balance of power did not alter. This article aims to analyze the politi-cal dynamics that surround the CHP by constructing an aggregate level analysis of its electoral environment since the 1950s in order to answer some of the questions relating to the redesign of the staunch dominant two-party model that currently prevails.
This paper scrutinizes why the Western European type of social democracy has not developed in Turkey. Both the historical backdrop and current constraints on the development of social democracy are examined. This paper argues that social democracy’s failure in Turkey has stemmed from two reasons. On the one hand, historical and structural constraints that obstructed social democracy should be taken into account. On the other, social democratiçmovements suffered from an agency question. The leadership of the political parties, which defined themselves as centre-left entities, had a number of chances to build a ‘genuine social democracy’, but they chose alternative policy paths based on identity politics. This phenomenon too prevented the development of social democracy. The CHP (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, Republican People’s Party) is the focal point of the paper since it has always been the main subject in the debates over social democracy in Turkey.
What determines voting behavior in Turkey? At a time when the center-right, religious-conservative leadership of the Justice and Development Party has dominated government and the political scene in Turkey—so much so that the democratic credentials of the regime have come into question—many have sought to understand what undergirds this party’s success at the polls. While many scholars have argued that elections in Turkey over time can be effectively and simply explained by static social or cultural cleavages, Wuthrich challenges these assertions with a framework that carefully attends to patterns of strategic vote-getting behavior in elections by political parties and their leaders.
Using the campaign speeches of the political elite, election data at national and provincial levels, and careful observations of voter mobilization strategies across time, Wuthrich traces four distinct patterns that explain important shifts in electoral behavior. He covers the first free and fair multiparty election in 1950 and follows campaign strategies through 2011, highlighting and explaining the potential development of a new and more problematic paradigm emerging in the post-2007 environment.
This article seeks to account for the prolonged inability of the Republican People's Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, CHP) to be considered as a credible alternative to the governing Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP). Accounting for this is relevant from two perspectives: the emergence of a dominant party system during the AKP decade, and the increased rhetoric and public discourse stressing the “lack of [credible] opposition parties” in the party spectrum. The article attributes the CHP's electoral malaise to a mixture structural and leadership problems specific to the party organization. This argument, however, is placed against the backdrop of the dominant distributive position that the incumbent occupies in Turkey's political arena. The AKP's domination of both national and local government, typified by a service-oriented governing style, serves to undermine not just the CHP's chances of success, but virtually all opposition parties.
This article explores how specific narratives of the past can be functionalized/ instrumentalized as discursive strategies in order to gain political power. To investigate this issue, four relevant governmental and non-governmental texts about the main opposition party in Turkey are analysed. The Republican People’s Party (CHP), which played a historic role by becoming a state party between 1923 and 1946, and which later adopted a social democratic position in the political system, has frequently been criticized by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) for its historical identity. The article illuminates how discursive strategies of argumentation, nomination and predication are used to portray the CHP as an enduring bureaucratic-militarist state party and the ways in which these strategies are functionalized by AKP politicians as well as by public intellectuals in favour of the government.
Over the past two decades, Albania has faced many social and economic changes, since it changes it economic system from a centralized one to a democratic one in early 90s. During this transitory phase, Albania had faced difficult challenges such as of undertaking all the necessary reforms for the stabilization, liberalization, privatization and integration of its economy in the overall global and regional economic trends. The first aim of this paper is to study the Albania Economy in its democratic era. The second aim of this paper is the identification of the main drivers to economic growth in the Albanian case during past two decades and the challenges that it faces today. Furthermore, this paper deals with some of the challenges that Albanian economy faces today such as SMEs challenges that represent the 98% of the market, rail infrastructure, lack of entrepreneurship, low level of innovation spirit among the enterprises, lack of focus in R&D.
This paper finds out that Albanian Economy has performed well but yet, there exists some critical challenges that should be face in order to achieve the desired level of economic development and competitiveness in global and regional market.
Whether religious parties’ inclusion in electoral competition moderates or polarizes their positions remains an enigma as deductive accounts yield contradictory results. This analysis questions the institution- and ideology-centered approaches to party change and shows that dichotomizing religious parties as moderate or extreme and moderation as a monolithic process obscures religious parties’ role in democracy. When scholars view moderation as consisting of behavioral and ideological dimensions and examine it through an inductive analysis of Israel and Turkey’s religious parties, several modes of moderation emerge with different democratic outcomes. While some bolster procedural democracy, others thwart the expansion of liberal democracy.
The Justice and Development Party (AKP) has become an effective and highly dynamic force in Turkish politics. The short time span between its sudden birth and its rise to power, as well as its remarkable achievements in economic and social reforms as part of the process towards European integration, has drawn a lot of attention to the party. It is important to investigate the circumstances in which the party was born, the interests it represents, and the political space it is likely to fill. In order to do that, the AKP will be first analyzed by an approach based on the argument that political parties, identities, and discourses do not develop independently from political, societal, and historical realities through which new threats, opportunities, interests, and knowledge are formed. Second, it will be argued that political parties have their own momentum and dynamism in terms of their historical continuity and the socialization of their leaders and adherents. Turkey, despite the continuity of its historical memory, is undergoing a radical social transformation. By interpreting the AKP in the context of these transformations, a representative picture of its dynamic and contextual (deterministic) existence can be drawn out. The article concludes that the AKP is neither a political design of its leaders and conditions, nor is it a political becoming understood and shaped by public perceptions and expectations; it is both.
The debate around Michels's “iron law of oligarchy” over the question of whether organizations inevitably become oligarchic reaches back almost a century, but the concept of oligarchy has frequently been left underspecified, and the measures that have been employed are especially inadequate for analyzing nonbureaucratically structured organizations. A conceptual model is needed that delineates what does and does not constitute oligarchy and can be applied in both bureaucratic and nonbureaucratic settings. Definitions found in the research are inadequate for two reasons. First, treating oligarchy solely as a feature of organizational structure neglects the possibility that a powerful elite may operate outside of the formal structure. A democratic structure is a necessary precondition, but it does not guarantee the absence of oligarchy. Second, studies that equate oligarchy with goal displacement and bureaucratic conservatism cannot account for organizations with radical goals that are nonetheless dominated by a ruling elite. This article presents a model that distinguishes between legitimate and illegitimate forms of formal and informal power to define oligarchy as a concentration of illegitimate power in the hands of an entrenched minority. The model is intended for use in organizations that are nominally democratic to determine whether a formal or informal leadership has in fact acquired oligarchic control. By providing a common framework for tracking fluctuations in the distribution and legitimacy of both formal and informal power, it is hoped that this model will facilitate a more productive bout of research on the conditions under which various forms of democratically structured organizations may be able to resist oligarchization.
Organizations distribute incentives to individuals in order to induce them to contribute activity. Aspects of organizational behavior and change are explained by exploring the differing consequences of different incentive systems. Three types of organizations are distinguished on the basis of three kinds of incentives: material, solidary, and purposive. Hypotheses are presented about the characteristic behavior of these types, and the correspondence between the types and certain actual organizations is shown. Changes in organizational activities and purposes are predicted by assuming that the executive's function is to perpetuate his group, and by assuming that he alters incentives to adapt to changes in the supplies of incentive-yielding resources. Co-operation, conflict, and other relationships among organizations are explained in terms of competition for autonomy and resources. It is suggested that gradual changes of personal motives within a society have predictable consequences for the character of organizations.
This contribution provides a historical review of the Republican Peoples Party (CHP), the oldest party of the Turkish Republic. In the last decade, the CHP failed to find a way of restructuring its ideology, support bases and organizational structure in an era of dramatic international, national, and local change. This failure lead to dramatic vote loss, resulting in fewer positions to share among supporters and creating a vicious circle resulting in more losses in vote.
The increase in the number of political party closure cases in Turkey in recent years has prompted concerns about the standards of Turkish democracy, particularly regarding freedom of expression and association. This study examines the underlying reasons why the Turkish Constitutional Court so often tends to dissolve political parties and compares its judgments with the established standards set forth by the European Court of Human Rights. The study finds that the Turkish Court frequently tends to interpret the 1982 Turkish Constitution's already restrictive clauses narrowly. The two issues that seem to be the most problematic in Turkish democracy are the definition and implementation of separatism and secularism.
Many recent discussions of the decline of party are predicated on the assumption that the Duverger/socialist mass-party model is the only model for parties. We contend that this assumption is misconceived, that the mass-party model is only one, temporally limited and contingent model, and that it is necessary to differentiate notions of adaptation and change from notions of decline or failure. Following an analysis of how various models of party can be located in terms of the relationship between civil society and the state, we contend that the recent period has witnessed the emergence of a new model of party, the cartel party, in which colluding parties become agents of the state and employ the resources of the state (the party state) to ensure their own collective survival. Finally, we suggest that the recent challenge to party is in fact a challenge to the cartel that the established parties have created for themselves.
The aim of the article is to analyse whether democratization of the candidate selection process has occurred in Western European parties in general and in Denmark in particular in the period from 1960 to 1990. The analysis is based on the party rules in force around 1960 and 1990 of 57 and 71 Western European parties, respectively. The general assumption is that the greater the role of the individual party member, the more democratically the parties conduct their internal affairs and, furthermore, the more decentralized the procedure, the greater the possibilities for individual party members to play a role. The analysis indicates that the candidate selection process was more decentralized and the role of the individual party member in the process were greater at the beginning of the 1990s than they were around 1960.
Social democratic parties in Western democracies have developed new strategies and policies to adapt to changing domestic and international conditions. The principal party of the center‐left in Turkey, the Republican People's Party, has performed poorly as the main opposition party due to its failure to devise new policies that address critical social and economic issues in Turkey. Moreover, the party has failed to function effectively as a result of organizational problems that have undermined its strength.
If one of the most interesting characteristics of the Turkish party system in the 1990s was the rapid rise of political Islam under the banner of the Welfare Party, an equally, perhaps even more, noteworthy development in the early 2000s is its transformation under the Justice and Development Party (AKP) leadership into a moderate conservative democratic party. Various aspects of this transformation are the central focus of this work. The AKP is compared with the earlier Islamist parties in terms of ideology, organization, competitive strategy, and government performance.
This article assesses the internal dynamics of the cartel party model. It argues that a party's endeavour to increase its societal reach by opening membership boundaries while keeping candidate selection local (two tendencies ascribed to this model), and the general need to maintain party unity, are difficult to reconcile. Therefore a fully fledged cartel party is organisationally vulnerable, which reinforces its resort to selective benefits (i.e. political appointments, patronage) whenever in government to satisfy organisational demands, a trigger intensifying party–state relations which is usually overlooked. Further, the dominant view of the ascendancy of parties' ‘public face’ needs to be qualified: the Irish Fianna Fáil, with its permeable boundaries and local candidate selection, reflects the cartel party model without a cartel at the party system level. Majoritarian dynamics have forced Fianna Fáil repeatedly into opposition which reveals the following: Fianna Fáil as a cartel party can afford to neglect its infrastructure on the ground as long as it is controlling government resources. In opposition its leadership initiates reforms to reinvigorate the party's infrastructure since it is pressed to generate organisational support through other means than distributing benefits.
A simple theory of power relations is developed in an effort to resolve some of the ambiguities surrounding "power," "authority," "legitimacy," and power "structures," through bringing them together in a coherent scheme. After defining a reciprocal power-dependence relation, attention is focused upon properties of balance and "balancing operations" in such relations. The theory dictates exactly four generic types of balancing process, and discussion of these leads directly into processes of group formation, including the emergence of group norms, role structure and status hierarchy, all presented as the outcome of balancing tendencies in power relations. Within the framework of this theory, authority appears quite naturally to be legitimized power, vested in roles, and "legitimation" is seen as a special case of the coalition process through which norms and role-prescriptions are formed. Finally, through treating both persons and groups as actors in a power-network (two or more connected power-dependence relations) the door is opened for meaningful analysis of complex power structures. Brief reference is made to findings from two experiments pertaining to hypotheses advanced in this theory.
Atatürk and Political Parties
- H Clement
- Dodd
Clement H. Dodd, 'Atatürk and Political Parties', in Metin Heper and Jacob M. Landau (eds.),
Political Parties and Democracy in Turkey, (London I. B. Tauris, 1991), pp. 24-42.
Election Assessment Mission Report: Republic of Turkey Early Parlia-mentary Elections 22
- Organization
- Security
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe/Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (OSCE/ODIHR), " Election Assessment Mission Report: Republic of Turkey Early Parlia-mentary Elections 22 July 2007, " p.14.
The relational notion of power is a highly debated issue in the discipline of international relations. However, the debate is relevant for all power structures including the ones in party organizations
- M Peter
- Richard M Blau
- Emerson
Peter M. Blau, Exchange and Power in Social Life (New York, N.Y. John Wiley
and Sons, Inc., 1964), pp. 118-125 and Richard M. Emerson, 'Power-dependence relations',
American Sociological Review, Vol. 27 (1962), pp.31-40. The relational notion of power is a highly
debated issue in the discipline of international relations. However, the debate is relevant for all
power structures including the ones in party organizations.
The Republican People's Party 1923-1945
- Kemal Karpat
Kemal Karpat, 'The Republican People's Party 1923-1945', in Metin Heper and Jacob M. Landau
(eds.), Political Parties and Democracy in Turkey, (London I. B. Tauris, 1991), pp. 42-64.
Siyasetin Finansmanı ve Siyasi Partiler
- See Ömer
- F Gençkaya
See Ömer F. Gençkaya, 'Siyasetin Finansmanı ve Siyasi Partiler' in Asomedya Ekim 2002;
http://www.bilkent.edu.tr/~genckaya/DEVPAR.htm (accessed 12 May 2008).
The Concept of Power
- Robert Dahl
Robert Dahl, 'The Concept of Power', Behavioral Science Vol. 2 (1957), pp. 201-215.
Baldwin explains this relational notion of power in discussing Knorr's concept of 'putative power', which is similar to what Baldwin calls
- Baldwin
Baldwin (1979), p.171. Baldwin explains this relational notion of power in discussing Knorr's
concept of 'putative power', which is similar to what Baldwin calls 'potential power'.
The delegate who made this statement was also one of the ex-administrators of the provincial party organization
The delegate who made this statement was also one of the ex-administrators of the provincial party
organization. Quoted in Timur Soykan, 'Parti İçi Demokrasiyi CHP'de Ara ki Bulasın!' [Look for
Intra-party Democracy within the CHP as if You Will Find It], Radikal, 28 January 2008;
http://www.radikal.com.tr/haber.php?haberno=245625 (accessed 20 April 2008).
The nomination process was also criticized in Altan Öymen
The nomination process was also criticized in Altan Öymen, 'Gizli Oylamanın Temelindeki
"Apaçık Oylama"' [The Explicit Voting Underlying the Secret Voting], Radikal, 29 April 2008;
http://www.radikal.com.tr/haber.php?haberno=254294 (accessed 30 April 2008).
See Article 134/8 of the AKP Constitution
See Article 134/8 of the AKP Constitution. Ak Parti Tüzüğü, http://www.akparti.org.tr/tuzuk.asp?
dizin=193&hangisi=2 (accessed 31 March 2008).