Politics between Market and Islam: The Electoral Puzzles and Changing Prospects of Pro-Islamic Parties

Politics between Market and Islam:

The Electoral Puzzles and Changing Prospects of Pro-Islamic Parties

Since the early 1990s, major features of Turkish politics have been the voters' tendency to support parties that seem to be on the margin of politics, the unprecedented electoral victories of pro-Islamic parties, and an increasing electoral volatility.¹ A review of the election results since the mid-1980s shows that Turkey's electoral competitions have been anything but predictable; the winners and losers change abruptly from one election to another.² It is not rare for a party to gain a significant plurality and establish itself as a pivotal actor in one election only to fall below the minimum required vote total for parliamentary representation in another.³ What marked the 2002 election was the stunning ascendancy of the Justice and Development Party (JDP)—a party that was established only fourteen months before the election. Although its agenda was not clear and its leader, Tayyip Erdogan, had once been convicted for "spreading hatred based on religion," the party garnered 34.23 percent of the general vote, which translated to 363 seats in Turkey's 550-member parliament. In this election, the number of nonvoters reached 21 percent, a record high since 1983 and one of the highest percentages in the country's history.⁴

Several vexing questions emerge from what appear to be puzzling electoral results: Why does the electorate shift its political choices radically from one election to another? What are the overall implications of the volatile elections and increasing support for pro-Islamic parties for Turkey's democracy? What factors make up the foundations of the recent success of the pro-Islamic JDP? What obstacles does the party's reform agenda face? In this analysis it is shown, first, that what seems to be sporadic support for pro-Islamic parties results from the parties' contradictory roles in Turkish politics, both as a reformist (i.e., their ability to undertake sweeping market reforms) and a conservative agent (i.e., their commitment to enhance the public presence of Islam). Despite their image as conservative, a review of Turkey's pro-Islamic parties shows that they have always been a motor of transformation in the economic arena, supporting market-oriented reforms. Yet they also have taken on a conservative role by challenging the strict secularist and modernist policies of the state. These parties' dual commitments, to strengthen the market and to enhance pro-Islamic policies, lie at the heart of both their successes and failures.

A political application of the "prospect theory" can help us understand how these dual goals position the proreligious parties' strategic choices for the electorate, as in Turkish politics, and how Turkish election results in general oscillate between support for center parties and new political outsiders.⁵ More specifically, the recent electoral success of and challenges facing pro-Islamic parties in Turkey can be understood in the following framework:Political outsiders (e.g., Islamist parties) gain support by promising to alter the existing policies toward a more egalitarian distribution of social justice. Their support bases are often broader than the number of their hard-core supporters. An initially successful implementation of neoliberal policies expands the political and economic opportunities available to the parties' main constituencies and strengthens the right-wing party's electoral support in general. Yet the parties' reliance on the trickle down effect of their economic reforms and the overall marginalization of redistributive policies during the implementation stage pose a challenge to the party elite's political power.⁶

Ultimately, it is the uneven benefits from these increasingly market-centered and export-oriented core policies that sever the party's ties with its popular base. The resulting popular discontent in return forces the parties to refocus their agenda on conservative social, populist Islamist rhetoric and to deviate from their political liberalization agenda.⁷ This shift to social and cultural...