Political Parties and Grassroots Clientelist Strategies in Urban Turkey: One Neighbourhood at a Time

Abstract

Both principal Turkish political parties make extensive use of patron–client networks, but in very different ways. The CHP relies on competing local brokers and synchronous vote buying. The AKP is at the centre of a network of public and private funding turning social policy to clientelist ends. Socially anchored AKP activists link the party to voters, allowing it to target social assistance for political advantage and take credit for improvement in local conditions. The case presented in this paper provides a natural experiment suggesting that this distinction is an important explanation for the AKP’s electoral success in low-income urban areas.

Keywords:

• Clientelism
• political patronage
• local networks
• urban politics
• AKP
• CHP

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Marc Smyrl for his comments and English language editing, Sabri Sayarı and Ayşegül Komsuoğlu for their comments on a previous version of this article and two anonymous referees, and the journal editors, Susannah Verney and Anna Bosco, for improvements to the present text.

Notes

1. Turkish Statistical Institute, 2014.

2. The PKK is a militant rebel group with Marxist roots; DHKP-C is the left-wing rebel group in Turkey. Both are included on the Turkish, EU and US lists of terrorist organisations.

3. Presidency of the electoral commission of Başakşehir District—March 2014.

4. According to the Turkish Statistical Institute (TUIK 2011), 57.3 per cent of the population has no more than a primary school education, while only 1.3 per cent holds a university degree.

5. ‘Fellowship associations’ are social and mutual aid associations bringing together residents from the same town of origin. In a neighbourhood largely populated by internal migrants, these are among the fundamental social units, and are frequently turned to political purposes. The muhtar, or neighbourhood headman is elected by residents and serves as liaison between the neighbourhood and the administrative services of the state.

6. Turkish Statistical Institute, 2013.

7. This observation does not necessarily contradict the conclusions of Marschall, Aydoğan & Bulut (2016), which are founded on cases where construction was underway instead of expected in an indefinite future, as was the case here. It does, however, highlight the ambiguous role of the housing issue in cases like this.

8. Supreme Election Council, available online at: https://sonuc.ysk.gov.tr/module/sspsYerel.jsf

9. It is generally impossible to know the proportion of funding coming from these various sources. This opacity of local social financing has been noted in other cases as well, see Eder (2010).

10. The former deputy mayor of Başakşehir recounted with considerable satisfaction that, when the AKP took office, there were in all six municipal street-cleaning workers for the two neighbourhoods of Şahintepe and Güvercitepe. The party asked the muhtars of the two quarters for lists of job seekers, with the result that ‘regular jobs with insurance’ in the municipality were provided for 376 persons (Interview 1, 2014).

11. This was observed by the author during the month prior to the election at the weekly breakfast meetings held every Thursday for neighbourhood women. Typically, 20 to 30 women presented themselves at each meeting.

12. There are limits to this anchoring, of course. Akdağ-Arıkan (2012) notes in the neighbourhoods she studies that areas under the control of Kurdish nationalist associations are inaccessible to the AKP. Anecdotal information from ethnographic interviews suggests that the same was true for Şahintepe.

13. These numbers are drawn from an internal CHP report of December 2013 evaluating the mayoral primaries.