ABSTRACT
Despite the wealth of knowledge contained in the considerable literature on Turkish politics we know little about the AKP and its organizational development, mainly due to the party’s short history and the lack of reception of the theoretical and comparative literature on party organizations in works on Turkish party politics. The AKP’s rapid rise to power and its subsequent trajectory raise a number of interesting questions for research, some of which will be explored in this study. The question of the AKP’s institutionalization as an organization has not been covered systematically in the extensive literature on Turkish political parties, so this study will build on that literature as well as utilizing valuable context information in a number of important areas. A rich body of scholarship exists on Turkish politics in Turkish and other languages, and this provides an array of knowledge that informs the present study. This review does not aim to cover the entire literature, but will focus on the scholarly works on party politics and texts that relate to the main focus of this study. There have been a number of studies on (or including) the AKP (Çarkogˇlu and Kalaycıogˇlu 2007, Laver and Benoit 2006, Rubin 2005, Bas¸levent, Kirmanogˇlu and S¸enatalar 2005, Sutton and Vertigans 2002, Silverstein 2003, Pamuk 2003, Jenkins 2003, Hermann 2003, Heper and Toktas¸ 2003, Fuller 2002, Connelly 2003, Aydıntas¸bas¸ 2002a/b, Bugˇra 2002). But these studies do not focus on the AKP’s organization and institutionalization. Where brief descriptions of features of the party’s organization are offered, they are not grounded in the theoretical literature on party organizations (e.g., Duverger 1954; Harmel and Janda 1982; Janda 1980; Katz and Mair 1994, 1995; Michels 1962 [1911]; Panebianco 1988). Rather, they tend to focus on Turkish politics of the last decade, the rise of Islamist movements or the question of the relationship between Islamic thinking and liberal democracy. The focus of this study, by contrast, is the extent to which the AKP has managed to institutionalize as a stable, major party in Turkey’s political system. Has the party moved beyond the initially successful model of a protest movement against the poor performance of preceding government parties? Has it generated organizational resources that will allow it to rely less strongly on charismatic leadership for its survival than in the past? Is it on the way to consolidate democratic practices within its organization? To what extent has the party gained a degree of autonomy from important actors in its environment? Although the recent special issue of the journal Turkish Studies on
religion and politics (Rubin 2005) addresses many important issues crucial for the AKP, the tensions and dilemmas facing the party as an organization remain undertheorized and understudied.
