ABSTRACT
This chapter presents Turkey profiles of longstanding democracies and of the European Union, and provides essential detail on history, electoral system, political parties and cleavages, and governments. The original Kemalist party was the republican people’s party, founded by Mustapha Kemal Ataturk in 1923 and the sole political party in Turkey until 1946. In the 1950s Turkey used a highly majoritarian electoral system in which the party with the plurality of votes in a given province won all of that province’s seats. Turkey has undergone a shift to electoral authoritarianism as of its November 2015 election, an authoritarianism which intensified greatly after a failed coup in July 2016. Mustapha Kemal Ataturk himself felt that traditional, Islamic Turkey needed to be modernized, and in many ways this meant adopting Western values. Governments in Turkey have tended to be led by one of whichever are the some main parties in a given period.
