ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an overview of the stages of party development in Turkey. It examines some of the major trends in the study of Turkey's party politics and the topics that have received the greatest attention from political scientists in recent years. An important feature of the first stage of party development in Turkey was the extension of party organizations, most notably which of the Ittihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti, from Istanbul to Anatolia, and to parts of the Balkans and Middle East that were under Ottoman rule. Turkey's political parties attracted considerable scholarly attention since many researchers believed that these parties played a critical role in the country's political development. Since the beginning of systematic research on parties in the 1960s, political scientists have studied a wide range of topics concerning party politics in Turkey. There has been, however, a noticeable concentration of research in three major areas, namely political party organizations, the party system and parties in the electorate.
