Party Systems and Regime Formation in the Modern Middle East: Explaining Turkish Exceptionalism

Abstract

Since 1950 competitive party politics and free and fair elections have to a significant extent determined who governs Turkey.1 Of all the modern states to emerge from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, Turkey alone evolved such competitive political institutions. Everywhere else in the Middle East, armies, families, hegemonic single parties, or monarchs came to dictate the rules and parameters of politics. Why did competitive electoral politics emerge in Turkey and nowhere else in the postcolonial Middle East? What explains authoritarian and competitive regime types in the region? How should Turkish exceptionalism be understood? Turkish pluralism is typically explained by either an externalist argument that cold war international influences were pivotal or an internalist one that Turkey's middle class is politically pluralistic. The origins of authoritarian rule elsewhere in the region are attributed to local political cultures, levels of socioeconomic development, or class structures. These rival hypotheses have key liabilities. A different approach highlights the causal impact of party system characteristics on regime construction. Upon the departure of the imperial powers from the region in the early twentieth century, the nature of nascent indigenous party systems significantly affected the type of political regimes that eventually emerged after Middle East states gained their independence. Three characteristics of party systems are pivotal: the number of parties, polarization levels, and the presence or absence of mobilizational asymmetry. In three countries single preponderant parties monopolized the political stage at independence and immediately constructed authoritarian one party regimes. The fate of countries where multiple parties existed at independence was influenced by how the remaining variables shaped events during transitional periods of political contestation before stable founding regimes were established.2 In five countries polarization and mobilizational asymmetry drove conservative parties to defect from democratic rules. Threatened by opponents' policy platforms, mounting organizational strength, and ideological appeal, they initiated vicious cycles in which the parties' behavior destroyed nascent competitive institutions and paved the way for the establishment of authoritarian regimes. Competitive institutions survived and matured in Turkey in part because its two party system became depolarized and more mobilizationally