Abstract
When and how do anti-system religious parties become incorporated into the political system of their countries? In recent decades, social scientists have sought answers to this question within the framework of the moderation literature. While moderation theory identifies key factors that influence party leaders’ willingness to seek political incorporation, it is less successful in explaining the contingent outcome of the incorporation process. This article develops an alternative analytical framework for the study of political incorporation grounded in social performance theory. Through a case study of Islamic parties in Turkey between 1994 and 2011, the author demonstrates that political incorporation is as much a function of successful cultural performances on the public stage as the right alignment of institutional incentives and sanctions. As a result of the Justice and Development Party leaders’ successful projection of a mainstream political identity between 2002 and 2011, secularist state elites in Turkey failed to establish legitimate grounds for a political intervention, which in turn provided the party with the time and opportunity to remove the institutional barriers to its incorporation.
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Notes
For a classic discussion of “guardianship” as an alternative to democracy, see Dahl 1980.
Among these studies, Stathis Kalyvas’s The Rise of Christian Democracy in Europe (1996) offers the most systematic account of this dilemma. In this section I widely draw upon his discussion of the “confessional dilemma.”
For a general discussion of the uses of the signaling games model in studies of political processes and behavior, see Banks 1991.
The argument that anti-systemness is culturally constructed does not contain any implicit assumptions concerning the practical validity of this construct. In other words, this cultural-sociological approach does not seek to answer the practical—and no doubt politically important—question of whether the actors and organizations depicted as anti-system constitute actual threats against democracy or the established political system.
For a collection of sociological studies that utilize this Durkheimian cultural framework, see Alexander (1988).
While both sides strategically engage in carefully crafted performances on the public stage in an effort to achieve these goals, whether and to what extent they are “taken in by their own act” or cynical about their performances (Goffman 1959, 17–21) is primarily a political question. From an analytical perspective, what matters for explaining the outcome of such symbolic struggles is how sincerity and artifice are constructed and perceived in the public sphere.
Kalyvas’s study (2000) similarly emphasizes the importance of party discipline and the need to silence radical voices for successful incorporation. However, while Kalyvas argues that radical voices within the movement reduce the credibility of the signals of commitment in the eyes of the state elites and thus provoke a direct reaction from the latter, I contend that these discordant voices hurt the credibility of party leaders in the eyes of the public and thus allow state elites to employ repressive measures against the religious party without suffering a critical loss of legitimacy.
The National Order Party, the precursor to the Welfare Party, was banned in 1971 by the Constitutional Court on grounds of violating the principle of secularism. Its successor, the National Salvation Party, was banned by the military junta in the aftermath of the 1980 coup along with virtually all existing political parties (Celep 2014).
The Welfare Party received 7.2 % of the national vote in the parliamentary elections of 1987, 9.8 % in the local elections of 1989, 16.9 % in the parliamentary elections of 1991 in an electoral alliance with two other parties, 19.1 % in the local elections of 1994, and 21.4 % in the parliamentary elections of 1995. All data on election results cited in the study have been collected from tuik.gov.tr (the website of the Turkish Statistical Institute), Accessed on 9 June 2012.
While the Welfare Party came close to striking a deal with Motherland Party in February 1996, the generals pressured the latter to back out (Bayramoğlu 2007, 54–55, 60). As a result, the first government coalition was formed by the Motherland Party and the True Path Party, two Center-right parties both of which had received fewer votes than the WP.
See fn. 12 above.
See fn. 12 above.
Military sources had alerted news agencies about the procession in order to secure its extensive coverage by the media (Birand 2012, 199–200).
In his public pronouncements, the leader of the Republican People’s Party associated the WP with the Islamic regime in Iran and praised the military’s course of action against the party (Milliyet 1997c; Bayramoğlu 2007, 199). In early June 1997, five major business associations and trade union confederations issued a public statement criticizing the WP’s reactionary activities against the secular republic and asking the government to step down (Milliyet 1997d). A week later, the Committee of Turkish Rectors declared that it was “determined to struggle against the attitudes and actions that aim to establish a regime based on imported religious foundations” (Milliyet 1997f).
A nation-wide survey conducted in 1999 showed that 73.2 % of the respondents saw the VP essentially as a continuation of the WP and only 15.3 % believed that Erbakan did not exercise any influence over the administration of the party (Çarkoğlu and Toprak 2000, 60).
Some of these Center-right politicians had joined the VP and followed Erdoğan to the JDP when the former party was banned.
The constitutional amendment package of 2010, proposed by the JDP and adopted in a referendum in September that year, curtailed the capacity of the then largely Kemalist high judiciary for self-reproduction by restructuring the compositions of the Constitutional Court and the High Council of Judges and Prosecutors (HSYK), the body that oversees the appointment, promotion, dismissal, and disciplinary proceedings of judges and prosecutors (Bâli 2012, 299–304).
As Aydın-Düzgit (2012, 329) points out, “Unlike the previous general elections of 22 July 2007 … the campaign period was not focused on the nature of the regime, but mainly on the economy, provision of services, values and the Kurdish question.”
Contextual factors such as the decline in violent conflicts between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) after 1999, U.S. support for moderate Islam in the region after 9/11, and the pattern of economic recovery and growth after 2002 might have helped reduce the propensity of the Turkish military to intervene in the political process in this period.
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Acknowledgments
Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Department of Sociology at The New School for Social Research and at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association. The author would like to thank David Smilde and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.
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Altınordu, A. The Political Incorporation of Anti-System Religious Parties: the Case of Turkish Political Islam (1994–2011). Qual Sociol 39, 147–171 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-016-9325-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-016-9325-8