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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.

Supplemental material, Online_Appendix for Dynamics of Polarization in the Greek Case by Jennifer McCoy, Murat Somer, Ioannis Andreadis and Yannis Stavrakakis in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science

Supplemental material, Online_Appendix for The Political Nature of Ideological Polarization: The Case of Hungary by Jennifer McCoy, Murat Somer and Federico Vegetti in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science

From a conceptual-theoretical as well as political perspective, this essay examines the interrelationships between the identity and foreign policy dimensions of Turkey’s Kurdish question and makes policy recommendations. Recent domestic and regional developments present both opportunities and great risks for Turkey’s social, political and territorial cohesion, peace and stability. In order to utilize the opportunities, Turkey needs to simultaneously achieve two goals. Domestically, it needs to successfully continue its present peace process and achieve genuine democratization. This process should culminate in a state of affairs whereby the complex social and political questions underlying the Kurdish question can be processed through the mechanisms of normal democratic politics and with the participation of legitimate Kurdish political actors. One crucial and insufficiently understood challenge the Turkish state and society have to manage during the peace process is the challenge of how to addressing the identity question, which is the formative basis of Turkey’s Kurdish question. This question consists of two separate but interrelated needs. The first is to address the Kurdish need and demands for ‘cultural-national’ recognition. The second is to address the need for a common national identity encompassing all ethnic-cultural groups, and to acknowledge that many Turks identify with Turkishness as such a common identity, which, they feel, should shape the state’s identity. These two challenges can only be met by introducing new and flexible categorizations to which people can feel belonging under different names. In foreign policy, Turkey should consolidate its improved relations with regional Kurds based on interdependence and its redline should be the emergence of a hostile Kurdish statehood in the region, not Kurdish self-rule per se. This, however, should be done without alienating Arabs by defending any particular status for Iraqi or Syrian Kurds. If Turkey fails in these endeavors, however, major destabilizing developments can occur whereby the identity and belonging perceptions of many Kurds as well as Turks can experience significant shifts.