Political Parties In Turkey Research Articles

What was the ‘Kurdish opening’ all about? A qualitative text analysis of parliamentary group speeches in Turkey

This study explores the use of four discourses – socio-economic, relative deprivation, pro-Islamist and terrorism oriented – used by political parties in Turkey to address the Kurdish issue and the resulting political party strategies during the Kurdish opening in Turkey. Although the factors that influence the Kurdish issue have drawn attention, no research has analysed Turkish political parties’ perspectives on the Kurdish issue in primary political documents. By examining 188 parliamentary group speeches delivered during the Kurdish opening process with qualitative text analysis, this study reveals that the mainstream parties in the Turkish Parliament employ socio-economic, relative deprivation and regional terrorism approaches, while the ethnic parties use either regional terrorism and pro-Islamist approaches or the relative deprivation approach. Due to the overlap in their discourses, the mainstream parties have developed a new strategy: compartmentalization of the ethnic issue by creating sub-ethnic categories. This research contributes to revealing political parties’ approaches to the Kurdish question and their strategies for mobilizing the ethnic median voter.

Political Parties and Women’s Rights in Turkey

Political parties are important political actors, but they are seldom studied in relation to human rights. This article examines the human rights discourse of political parties in Turkey by focusing on women’s rights. The content analysis of party programmes issued by major political parties between 1923 and 2007 reveals significant differences and changes in parties’ approach to women, ranging from no mentioning of women to addressing women’s issues from a feminist perspective. Women’s rights and issues, once neglected practically by all political parties, have gained attention during the last few decades, largely due to women’s activism. While conservative, religious, and Turkish nationalist parties started to display a dualist approach that combines traditionalism with gender equality, social democrat, socialist, and pro-Kurdish parties increasingly employ feminist terminology and analysis.

Institutional Aspects of the (De-)Europeanization of Turkish Political Parties. The Case of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the Republican People’s Party (CHP)

This paper investigates the impact the European Union (EU) accession process has had on Turkish political parties—the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP)—as far as their internal structures and intra-party distribution of power are concerned. The paper contends that political parties in Turkey have not only been immune to any organizational adaptation that may have resulted from the accession process, but in the past decade, they have become increasingly de-Europeanized. This insularity from Europeanization impulses can be attributed to Turkey’s personalized political system and the ineffectiveness of the parliamentary institutions responsible for EU policy, especially the EU Harmonization Committee.

Party institutionalization and democratic consolidation

The literature on democratic consolidation emphasizes the importance of effective parties for the functioning of democracy. Specifically, the institutional resilience of democracy and the consolidation of broad-based representative government require the institutionalization of major political factions. In this article, I reassess this thesis and apply it to the political parties in Turkey and Southern Europe by employing the comparative method of difference. Two major conclusions are reached. First, party institutionalization does not constitute a sufficient condition for democratic consolidation. Moreover, several institutional rules that may challenge the very idea of democracy tend to support party institutionalization. Second, party institutionalization reinforced by partisan polarization may result in tenser relations among political parties – a situation that does not contribute to democratic consolidation.

Rising euroscepticism in Turkish politics: The cases of the AKP and the CHP

This article discusses the main reasons why the AKP and the CHP, the leading pro-EU political parties in Turkey, started embracing a highly critical stance against the EU and showing reluctance towards Turkey’s EU membership. The extant scholarly works only give a limited account on how to explain such an attitudinal change in the selected parties as they offer rather static terms for analysing the phenomenon. Instead, a contextual framework will be introduced in order to better analyse eurosceptic change in candidate countries in general, and in Turkey in particular. The framework explicates the notion that the ‘eurosceptic turn’ within candidate countries develops mainly as a reaction to extra conditional pressures coming from the EU that are not officially part of the standard membership conditionality. After discussing the empirical findings concerning the shifting EU stances of both parties in detail, the article will make sense of the rising euroscepticism in Turkish political arena in accordance with the suggested theoretical framework. The article concludes that the rise of euroscepticism in Turkish political arena has been developed as a firm reaction to the increasing scepticism and reluctance within the EU towards Turkey’s accession.

The Approaches of Turkish Political Parties towards Entrepreneurship in their Party Programmes

This study aims to identify to what extent political parties in Turkey include the concept of entrepreneur and entrepreneurship, which are regarded as the most essential resources of countries’ in international competition, in their programmes. In other words, the attitudes of political parties towards entrepreneurship will be set forth. The study covers the “economical approaches” part of programmes of the political parties which were represented in Turkish Grand National Assembly between 1923 -2011. Parties, which were established as political parties but were not represented in Turkish Grand National Assembly were left out of the scope of the study. Method: “Document review”, which is a frequently used qualitative research method in social sciences, was used in this study. The data is obtained by content analysis. Such words as “entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, individual initiative, individual enterprise, private enterprise, special entities, proprietary capital and private sector in the political party programmes were identified as key words and it was acknowledged that such concepts were perceived as “entrepreneurship” by the political parties. Thus, the approaches of political parties are taken in the scope of the study.

Forecasting elections in Turkey

Abstract This paper proposes a model for forecasting elections in Turkey. In doing so, this study is based on three theoretical premises: first, that the voters reward or punish parties according to their performances relative to the macroeconomic conditions; second, that the popularity of the political parties in Turkey are closely connected to their performances in local elections; and third, that the centre-periphery distinction affects the fortunes of the political parties in Turkey. The contribution of this analysis is the introduction of an explicit model on which can forecast the impact of economic and political variables on the elections in Turkey by using reliable, public and macro level data. Our findings show that the dynamics of the evaluation of political parties in Turkey follow a similar pattern to those of contemporary democracies, being driven by both economic and political factors. “…why did AKP win? There cannot be a scientific and sociological explanation of this.” Ozdemir Ince, 17 August 2007, Hurriyet, emphasis added.

Authoritarian Party Structures in Turkey: A Comparison of the Republican People's Party and the Justice and Development Party

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.

Party Dissolutions and Democratic Consolidation: The Turkish Case

Political party competition constitutes an important component of democratic consolidation. In this respect, party dissolutions are generally regarded as impeding consolidation of democracies. This study addresses the relationship between party dissolutions and democratic consolidation, and offers an analysis of recent dissolutions of religiously and ethnically oriented political parties in Turkey. Drawing on Geoffrey Pridham's distinction between ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ democratic consolidation, the study concludes that the dissolutions of religiously oriented parties have contributed to the former while the dissolutions of ethnically oriented political parties have not. Meanwhile, the possible dissolution of the Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP), representing 46.6 per cent of the population, would constitute a challenge to ‘positive’ democratic consolidation.

Progress, Unity, and Democracy: Dissolving Political Parties in Turkey

In this article, I analyze two cases where the Turkish Constitutional Court dissolved political parties during the 1990s. Specifically, I examine the cases against the Islamist Refah (Welfare/Well-Being) Party and the pro-Kurdish Halkin Emek Partisi (People's Labor Party). While the former was charged with threatening the secular basis of the national social order, the charges against the latter were around its allegedly separatist character. I engage in an in-depth analysis of the lines of argument in the indictments, arguments of defense deployed by the parties, and their ultimate contestations as they appeared in the final decisions by the Court. I see the Court as engaging with a medley of themes and tendencies, [trying to resolve them for the case at hand]. I argue that despite the differences in the construction of the alleged threats, in both cases the Court deployed a similar image of the ways in which social, political, and judicial terrains interact. A rather arbitrary boundary between the political and cultural domains informs these decisions. The Court operates with the understanding that once this boundary is transgressed, what may be harmless when an issue is cultural—such as the use of the headscarf or of the Kurdish language—may turn into a political symbol threatening the basis of the united, democratic, and progressive nation-state. In this vision, the concepts of democracy, progress, and unity are intimately tied together such that the threat to one of these concepts almost simultaneously constitutes a threat to the other two. The Court imagines itself as protecting the boundary between the political and cultural domains in an effort to uphold the right of a democracy to protect itself. This line of thought also enables the court's rather routine involvement in the political domain—which has brought about eighteen decisions for political party dissolution since 1980.

Voter Profiles and Fragmentation in the Turkish Party System

Based on the multinomial logit estimates of an individual vote intention function, we perform restriction tests to make pairwise comparisons of the voter profiles of the major political parties in Turkey. The economic variables in the model are items that represent the well known hypotheses of economic voting theory, i.e. whether individuals vote retrospectively and/or prospectively, and whether they are sociotropic and/or pocketbook. The non-economic factors include socio-demographic characteristics as well as issues and identity variables that are likely to be good predictors of the party choice. In many cases, restriction tests provide evidence refuting the general view that the Turkish party system is artificially fragmented.

The Turkish Pendulum between Globalization and Security: From the Late Ottoman Era to the 1930s

The primary goal of this article is to understand the historical dynamics which led in Turkey to the emergence of a pendulum between liberalization/ globalization at the time perceived as integration with the modern and popular west, in particular, Europe and national security, seen as the preservation of the Ottoman lands against both external (ironically the large European powers and Russia) and internal enemies (internal in the sense of those nations and ethnic groups which aspired to be independent of Ottoman rule and which were, again ironically, open therefore to the manipulation of the external enemies). To understand these dynamics requires two main missions. First, by looking into the political liberalization initiatives of the late Ottoman era (seen in the most general sense as those attempts to share political power with the Sultan) and their relation with the tremendous public concern over the empire's security, the article explores the genealogy and formation as well as the overwhelmingly shared perception of a dichotomous relationship between security and liberalization.' Second, by carrying out a detailed analysis of the two attempts to introduce multi-party politics during the republican era, I try to show how the previously identified dichotomy between liberalization and security developed into a 'national security syndrome', through which the democratic liberalization process would be systematically administered, managed and, ultimately, contained. It can be argued that the Ottoman state was, by and large, a garrison state, in which the waging of war was one of the main factors behind its construction and resulting structure.2 At a time in history when the rule of the day was conquest, power, alliances and geopolitics, the Ottoman state was a true example of a geopolitical state/empire. This primacy of geopolitics made the Ottoman state a largely centralized and highly hierarchical power apparatus at the hands of the sultans, and for the most part, security issues were able to be handled quite efficiently.

Dissolution of Political Parties by the Constitutional Court in Turkey

In this article the author examines the constitutional court cases that led to the dissolution of two political parties in Turkey: Halkin Emek Partisi (People's Labor Party) a leftist, pro-Kurdish party and Refah (Well-Being/Welfare Party) a center-right Islamist party. These two decisions set constitutional milestones that not only affected later similar cases, but more generally also shaped the constitutional trajectory of Turkey. The author examines these cases along three main axes: procedural foundations, substantive constructions of `threats', and the international context. She offers an analytic approach that treats the constitution not merely as text but as a hub of multiple themes, multiple venues for action, deployed by multiple actors for multiple ends. She shows how various venues of action and interpretation respond to a larger framework consisting of an unstable thematic assortment of Kemalist ideology, international treaties and the legacy of the 1980 military intervention. By following the ways in which the court responded to such venues of interpretation, the author establishes the crucial coordinates of the intricate relation between the domains of law and politics as it has been played out on the constitutional level.

Political parties in Turkey

Political parties in Turkey

Limitations on the Freedom of Political Parties in Turkey and the Jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights

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.

Turkey: Yesterday, today and tomorrow

Until recently, although they did not subscribe to political Islam, religiously‐oriented political parties in Turkey were closed down because their leaders could not prevent some militant members from making statements provocative to the secular and democratic regime in that country. Turkey has had a cultural‐cum‐civic nationalism; consequently, even Turkey's long‐standing Kurdish problem, which in recent years has been brought under control, did not give rise to ethnic nationalism. Nonetheless, the military, which in the post‐19 60 period has intervened in politics several times, has continued to perceive political Islam and the ethnic question as critical threats for Turkey. Here the generally inept performance of political actors was a major contributory factor. On the eve of the twenty‐first century, however, Turkey has begun to be governed by a stable and effective coalition government that has enabled the Turks to look into the future with greater optimism.

Siyasal Konjonktür Dalgaları Ve Türkiye''de Seçmen Davranışı

The literature about political business cycles has grown in 1970s but there were some other works before 1970s. For example, M. Kalecki examined politics-economics relationship. This literature depends on the adaptive expectations and exploitable Philips curve. Instead of adaptive expectations, with the rational expectations there is a pause at beginning of 1980s. After that, many academicians studied the political business cycles through the framework of rational expectations. Another interesting development is about voter?s behavior studies. In economics, it is assumed that the voters will decide either adaptive or rational expectations. In public choice, the models that began with Downs (1957) politician, bureaucrat, government, and voter relationships examine with the help of the optimization methods. Moreover, voters? behavior is explained other variables such as income distribution etc. As partly independent all of this literature, political science literature examines the voters? behavior more widely than economics. In that paper, the base of voters of political parties in Turkey is studied in the framework of economics and political science.

Political parties in Turkey: the role of Islam

Political parties in Turkey: the role of Islam

Political Development and Political Parties in Turkey. By Ersin Onulduran. (Ankara, Turkey: Ankara University Press, 1974. Pp. 116. TL 12.50.) - State and Society in the Politics of Turkey's Development. By Ilkay Sunar. (Ankara, Turkey: Ankara University Press, 1974. Pp. ix, 196. TL 20.)

Political Development and Political Parties in Turkey. By Ersin Onulduran. (Ankara, Turkey: Ankara University Press, 1974. Pp. 116. TL 12.50.) - State and Society in the Politics of Turkey's Development. By Ilkay Sunar. (Ankara, Turkey: Ankara University Press, 1974. Pp. ix, 196. TL 20.) - Volume 71 Issue 3