Turkish Politics and the Rise of the AKP by Arda Can Kumbaracibasi

Author:Arda Can Kumbaracibasi [Kumbaracibasi, Arda Can]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Middle East, General, Political Science, Political Process, Political Parties, Social Science, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9781134007660
Google: sKl5AgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2009-09-10T01:15:38+00:00

Some scholars have argued, on the other hand, that the nature of a rational-efficient party may vary according to institutional variances, such as electoral system, extent of state centralization, number of competing parties, and the presidential or parliamentary base of executive power (Epstein 1967, Harmel and Janda 1982, Sartori 1976). From this perspective, Michels’ centralized and bureaucratic parties are rational-efficient vehicles of party competition only in countries with parliamentary government, a centralized state organization, and a proportional representation electoral system (Kitschelt 1989b: 43).

It was argued in Chapter 4 that the legal framework of the Turkish SPK (Law on Political Parties) has done little to support levels of intra-party democracy that are the norm in many Western European parties. The laws on party organization, elections, and finance were not designed to maintain centralized leadership control over political parties but holes in the legislation allowed this to happen. Although the major Turkish parties have well-established organizations from the national down to the local level, the scope for grassroots involvement remains limited, and leaders often remain unaccountable to the members. In all major Turkish parties, the legal framework reinforces traditions of populist leadership, preventing Turkish parties to develop systemness to the extent observed in many political parties of Western Europe (see, for example, Müller 2000).

As explained in Chapter 2, Panebianco’s (1988) model of party evolution is based on three stages: successful party organizations move from organizational genesis to maturity with a process of institutionalization as an intermediate process. As pointed out in Chapter 2, Panebianco (ibid.: 58–59) offers a number of criteria that allow the study of institutionalization processes. A party has gone through a successful process of institutionalization if it displays a

• “developed central bureaucracy, a strong national apparatus confronting the party’s intermediate and peripheral associations”;

• “relatively uniform organizational structure at all organizational levels throughout the national territory”;

• central extra-parliamentary leadership which “has at its disposal a revenue system based on a regular flow of contributions from a plurality of sources”;

• dominance of the party organization vis-à-vis external organizations associated with it: “external organizations act as the party’s ‘transmission belt’”; and

• strong correspondence between the party’s statutory norms of organization and its “actual power structure.”

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