ABSTRACT
While the previous chapter dealt with legal and political limitations to the Turkish parties’ systemness, the present chapter will deal with background information on one aspect of the second major dimension of party institutionalization in Panebianco’s (1988) framework: the parties’ autonomy vis-à-vis their environment. For parties competing in elections, voters are obviously the most important part of their organizational environment. Electoral support is an indispensable precondition of partisan autonomy. The electoral aspect will be dealt with in more detail in Chapter 6. Here, the non-electoral side of party autonomy will be discussed. There are a number of actors in a party’s organizational environment that need to be taken into account. Beyond the constitutional and legal constraints discussed previously, these actors can be seen as part of the parties’ “political opportunity structure” that defines the powers of allies and opponents. This chapter will deal mainly with these actors in the Turkish political system.
