ABSTRACT
This paper examines the transformation of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s politics in the AKP government era through the interactive supply-and-demand relationship between populist leaders and their supporters, which has been a focus of recent populist studies. It employs the concept of ‘the politics of belonging’ to scrutinize the mechanisms through which not only the Islamic and conservative boundary of belonging in Turkey but also the meanings of symbols reifying belonging are established and negotiated in response to Erdoğan’s shifting populist methods.
