Turkey under the AK Party rule: from dominant party politics to dominant party system?

• Author: Ete, Hatem

Introduction

Turkey has vast experience with electoral culture and a rich tradition of party politics. It is possible to trace the country's familiarity with elections, political parties and the parliamentary system to either 1876 or 1908.1 Although the first and second constitutional periods of the late Ottoman Empire did not continue for a long time, the Republic inherited a notable culture of political parties and elections. It was this legacy that paved the way for the emergence of multiple political circles within the First National Assembly, (2) which led to the War of Independence, and the Second National Assembly, its immediate successor. While the 1924 Constitution intended to nurture a political system with a multitude of political parties, (3) a de facto single-party system was put in place when the Kemalist elites, fearing that political opposition would jeopardize their plans to establish a new state and construct a new national identity, shut down the Progressive Republican Party (Terakkiperver Cumhuriyet Firkasi) in 1925.4 Five years later, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk paved the way for the establishment of the Free Republican Party (Serbest Cumhuri yet Firka) as a pseudo-opposition party, to make the single-party rule appear more democratic, only to renounce the plan 99 days later in order to prevent the potential political costs of providing an alternative to the ruling party. (5)

Although a de facto single-party system was in place between 1923 and 1946, Turkey held regular parliamentary and local elections in accordance with the terms, limits and requirements stipulated by the 1924 Constitution. The country, however, did not transition into a multi-party system until 1946. Meanwhile, it is important to note that the lack of judicial oversight, coupled with open ballots and secret counts in the 1946 elections, postponed the introduction of free and fair elections until 1950--when the authorities allowed multiple political parties to participate in the race and fostered a competitive electoral environment. With the exception of brief transition periods after military coups, therefore, Turkey has been governed by a parliamentary system since the Republic's foundation in 1923.

From 1946 onwards, the total of 21 parliamentary elections that took place under the multi-party system allowed only two political parties to win three or more consecutive elections: The Democratic Party (DP, 1946-1960) and the Justice and Development Party (AK Party, 2001-present). The AK Party is the only party in the republic's history to win five consecutive parlimantery elections, hence forming single party governments, with the exception of a brief period between the June 7, 2015 general elections and the November 1, 2015 repeat election, during which period an AK Party-led caretaker government was in place. In addition, although the DP defeated the Republican People's Party (CHP) in 1950, 1954 and 1957, the party's popular support dropped from 58 to 48 percent in 1957 while the main opposition CHP enjoyed an increase from 35 to 41 percent and reduced the margin to roughly 7 percent. (6) After the first three elections, held under judicial supervision and according to the principles of secret ballot and open count in the multi-party system's early years, no political party succeeded in recording three consecutive election victories until the 2000s, and no party in Turkey, except the AK Party, has registered four electoral victories in a row since the advent of the multi-party system, nominally in 1946 and genuinely in 1950.

Established in 2001, the AK Party won five consecutive elections in 2002, 2007, 2011, and twice in 2015, and outperformed the DP both by winning more consecutive elections and by steadily increasing its popular support in each election cycle. (7) Having won with 34.4 percent in the 2002 parliamentary elections, the party increased its votes to 46.6 percent in 2007, 49.8 in 2011, and 49.5 in the November 1, 2015 parliamentary elections. In contrast with the DP, whose popularity dipped in the 1957 elections, the AK Party, despite a setback in the June 7, 2015 election, today enjoys a steady increase in its popularity while the opposition parties seem unable to improve their records in any significant way, with the exception of the pro-Kurdish People's Democratic Party (HDP)'s major electoral victory on June 7, 2015, in which it received over 13 percent of the national votes--a figure that was almost twice as much as the pro-Kurdish parties' traditional electoral performance. (8) The main opposition CHP received respectively 19.4, 20.9, 25.9, 25.0 and 25.3 percent of the vote in the five parliamentary elections that resulted in AK Party victories. Putting aside the 2002 election, while the AK Party controls approximately 50 percent of the electorate, the opposition parties compete among themselves for the remaining half.

Three local elections in 2004, 2009 and 2014, two constitutional referendums in 2007 and 2010, as well as the presidential election in 2014 that evolved into an electoral contest between the AK Party and the opposition, would attest to the above analysis, meaning that the AK Party (or the political platform defended by the AK Party) has had a wide lead over its contenders in each of these elections or referandums. In each election since its establishment, the AK Party has defeated its competitors and has recorded a success that has given rise to an academic debate that claims that the AK Party has gained the status of a dominant party, and that the Turkish party system has become a dominant-party system. (9) To be sure, the terms dominant party and dominant-party system represent relatively novel concepts for the general public in Turkey.

As such, the debate has been largely confined to a small audience that consists of a handful of academics and journalists with an interest in the AK Party's current and future positions. Despite receiving limited attention from within Turkey, however, these concepts have a vast literature at the international level. The AK Party's experience in Turkey is a recent addition to this body of the literature.

The existing body of literature about dominant parties largely addresses the following political parties: the Liberal Democratic Party (Japan), the Indian National Congress (India), the Mapai/Labor Party (Israel), the Kuomintang/ Chinese Nationalist Party (Taiwan), the Social Democratic Party (Sweden), the Institutional Revolutionary Party (Mexico), the Christian Democratic Party (Italy), the African National Congress (South Africa) and the United Malays National Organisation (Malaysia). The aforementioned political parties have been recognized as dominant parties by virtue of their ability to remain in power for extended periods of time. Only two of them, the African National Congress and the United Malays National Organisation, maintain their position as dominant parties today. The others have been deprived of this status after bowing to their opponents. In other words, the cycle of dominant parties has ended in all countries with the exception of South Africa and Malaysia. (10)

It is possible to identify certain common themes in the ways in which the large body of literature has analyzed dominant parties, and dominant-party systems in various countries. The emergence of dominant parties, the ways in which they cling to political power as well as the reasons behind their eventual demise are among the common themes. In this sense, it is also possible to identify the factors that facilitate dominant parties' power as a common theme. (11)

For the purpose of this article, we will discuss whether or not the AK Party and Turkey have, respectively, evolved into a dominant party and a dominant-party system in light of the AK party's election victories since 2002.

Conceptual Framework: Dominant Parties and Dominant-Party Systems

The concepts dominant party and dominant-party system are difficult to separate since they simultaneously come into play during attempts to categorize party systems. In other words, the academic literature on the categorization of party systems often utilizes the two terms together and, not infrequently, almost interchangeably. Both Maurice Duverger's political science classic, Les Partis Politiques (1993) (12) and more recent studies in the same discipline analyze the concepts during their discussions of party systems.

The dominant-party system is a type of party system, which refers a form of classification relevant to the relations between different political parties and the circumstances wherein this relation occurs. Party system can be classified with reference to the number of political parties, openness to competition, the relative power and geographical distribution of electoral support, among others. The most common criterion among these, however, is the number of political parties in a given system. This gauge, which we largely owe to Duverger himself, is still widely utilized to categorize party systems. Duverger's now-classic assessment, based on the numerical criterion, identified distinct types of party systems such as single-party, Anglo-Saxon two-party, and multi-party. (13) It is also important to note that Duverger engaged in discussions about different party systems (i.e. independent parties, alliances, balanced parties, dominant-party systems) that complemented with the above-mentioned categorization.

According to Duverger's classification, a dominant-party system is based on the "power" criterion. Here, it is noteworthy that the dominant-party system, which emerged in relation to the "power" criterion, tends to complement and unite with party systems with numerical references such as single-party, two-party and multi-party systems. In other words, Duverger emphasized that a given political party could assume the role of a dominant party in both two-party and multi-party systems. (14)

The assumption of...