ABSTRACT
Political parties have been in existence in Turkey for more than a century. Since their emergence during the final years of the Ottoman Empire and in the first decade of the twentieth century, parties have remained on the political stage almost continuously.1 The only major exception to this long-term trend occurred in the aftermath of the 1980 military coup, when a ban imposed on all existing parties formally left Turkey a “partyless” state for nearly three years. Although Turkey has a relatively long history of parties, it has a more recent history of democracy. Until the transition to democracy in the immediate aftermath of World War II, political parties functioned within nondemocratic regimes and in the absence of mass political participation. The transformation of Turkey’s political life and the birth of a competitive multiparty system in the late 1940s significantly expanded the scope of party politics and the role of parties in the political process.
