National Elections in Turkey: People, Politics, and the Party System by F. Michael Wuthrich (review)

Michael Wuthrich’s National Elections in Turkey provides a comprehensive overview of the Turkish political party system and its evolution since 1950. The book is motivated by the conviction that Turkish politics is predominantly determined by party politics rather than religion, ideology, or deep-seated social cleavages. The analysis focuses on the party system as a whole, rather than on specific parties: how the system changed over time and how it structures multiparty elections. While the author pays his dues to the classic works by Maurice Duverger, Seymour Martin Lipset, Stein Rokkan, and Anthony Downs, he also engages with the rich literature produced by prominent Turkish scholars. The book provides a detailed and informative political history of the Turkish case. The reader learns about the historical context of each and every general election since 1950, the personalities that influenced electoral politics in each decade, the issues that dominated the public sphere, and the parties’ positions on controversial topics. Anyone who seeks a historically grounded understanding of Turkish politics at the national level would benefit from Wuthrich’s research.

National Elections in Turkey covers the development of the Turkish party system from 1950 to 2011, and provides brief observations about recent events. The book’s main argument is that the party system’s evolution can best be understood by describing the organizing principles of each electoral “paradigm.” The paradigms refer to systemic orientations in elections. Wuthrich identifies five distinct electoral paradigms in Turkey’s recent history, including the current one that is organized around a predominant party, the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, or AKP). The “initial paradigm” (1950–65) followed the first free and fair multi-party elections in Turkey, and featured elite-dominated parties that used clientelism and patronage to gain votes. The “ideological imaging paradigm” (1965–80) saw the rise of the left-right axis in Turkish politics after the enactment of the relatively liberal 1961 constitution. The “national center paradigm” existed briefly between 1983 and 1991 when the latest military coup prevented explicitly ideological parties and party leaders from running for office. The main parties during this period deemphasized their ideological commitments and focused mostly on social service provision. This was replaced by the “culture-identity paradigm” (1995-2007) with the rise to prominence of Islamists in the Welfare Party (Refah Partisi, or RP). Wurthrich identifies an important shortcoming in much of the recent literature on Turkish politics: the tendency to ascribe our contemporary fascination with political Islam to a broader history of Turkish politics where it does not belong. Attributing essential, static features to a fluid party system leads to bias when interpreting the evolution of the Turkish political system. According to Wuthrich, the so-called Islamist-secularist cleavage in Turkish politics was a prominent feature of the culture-identity paradigm (1995–2007), but not of the preceding periods. The alternative presented in this book is to focus on systemic orientations in the party system across electoral paradigms according to the political themes that were dominant during each period.

Wuthrich’s theory of electoral paradigms is based on two main concepts: dimensions of competition and domains of identification. Dimensions of competition, i.e., what parties do, are explicit party strategies used to convince and mobilize voters. How parties position themselves ideologically and discursively, how they interact with civic organizations and form patronage relations with voters belongs to this category. Domains of identification are what parties “are.” They are the implicit party strategies that appeal to voters’ latent identities without openly declaring them. The author uses these concepts to organize his discussion of each electoral paradigm. They serve as tools to simplify the immense complexity of each era and provide a description of what drove party competition. Wuthrich’s method enables him to dispel widely accepted essentialist notions about Turkish politics. He convincingly demonstrates the futility of reading Turkish politics through the lens of a persistent center...