Islamist Mobilisation in Secularist Strongholds: Institutional Change and Electoral Performance in Turkey

Abstract

How do Islamist parties mobilise support and win elections in secularist strongholds? What explains the electoral performance of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey’s most consistently secularist region – western Anatolia? This article explores these questions with a comparative case study of two similar cities in the periphery of İzmir where the AKP registered significantly different electoral results: Ödemiş and Salihli. It shows that deep institutional transformations of the local party organisations, including leadership turnover, reshuffling of the party cadres, and an explicit attempt by local party leaders to moderate and move to the political centre, were necessary factors for the AKP to succeed in elections where the Islamist constituency is weak.

Keywords:

• Islamist politics
• secularism
• political parties
• Turkey
• AKP
• local politics

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Melani Cammett, Pauline Jones Luong, Patrick Heller, and Yelena Biberman for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper. I would also like to thank the editors of South European Society and Politics, Susannah Verney and Anna Bosco, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Research for this article was supported by the Smith Richardson Foundation, Brown University, and Skidmore College, for which I am grateful.

Notes

1. Data presented in Table 1 were compiled by the author after extensive fieldwork in Ödemiş and Salihli. Consult www.turkstat.gov.tr for demographic data.

2. See the Appendix for a list of all cited interviews.

3. Particularly the conflict between the Turkish nationalists and Greek forces: 1919–22.

4. A colourful expression uttered by the local leader of the DP organisation to describe MHP members with DYP leanings. The wolf symbolises the nationalists, and the horse is the symbol of the DYP. A ‘sheep in horseshoes’ is a particularly biting way to describe ersatz nationalists.