ABSTRACT
Turkish politics inherited an Ottoman legacy of patrimonial and centralised politics which divided the society along a culturally homogenous, organised, and powerful centre versus a culturally heterogeneous, disorganised and relatively powerless periphery. However, with the advent of modernisation, secularisation, and nationalism in the nineteenth century, Turkish politics was further riven by several cultural fault lines that divide the body politic into several blocs with different values and lifestyles along ethnic, confessional, sectarian, and secular-religious piety. These have provided the socio-cultural bases for political organisations and parties for the last century. With democratisation since 1945, Turkey adopted both majoritarian and proportional representation electoral systems, and the popular vote concomitantly oscillated to produce predominant one-party to multi-party systems. However, voter realignment of the 1990s produced a religious conservative and nationalist hegemony, which led to the rapid erosion of democratisation and the eventual establishment of a hegemonic one-party system by 2017.
