State and faith: the supply-side theory of religion and the case of Turkey

ABSTRACT

We draw on Turkey – a Muslim-majority country governed by the pro-Islamist Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi – AKP) for the past two decades – to examine some underexplored implications of the supply-side theory of religion. The longevity and shifting nature of AKP rule provide a unique opportunity to observe the subtleties involved in the noticeable strengthening of Sunni Islam’s religious monopoly in a Muslim society. Results from a series of public opinion surveys conducted between 2010 and 2020 show that the AKP rule has caused the religious segment of Turkish society to consolidate around AKP and secular sections to consolidate around the opposition, leading to a significant polarization within the country. We argue this is because hegemonic religious policies may create crosscutting effects which both increase and decrease religiosity. The findings also have political implications that are undertheorized in the supply-side literature.

KEYWORDS:

• State
• faith
• supply-side theory of religion
• Turkey
• AKP

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. For recent reviews of this literature see Fox (2018) and Keov (2022).

2. We thank KONDA Research and Consultancy, particularly Bekir Agirdir and Erman Bakirci, for sharing their data with us.

3. Respondents who refused to answer this question were dropped from the analysis.

4. Single male respondents and those who refused to answer this question were excluded.

5. MHP is a far-right party with a heavy dose of Turkish nationalism. It has been in a de facto coalition with the AKP since late 2015.

6. We also controlled for whether respondents lived in a village, city, or metropolis as well as their income levels. The urbanites were less likely to identify as religious, but the urban/rural and income variables were highly correlated with the education variable. To avoid multicollinearity, we dropped the urban/rural and income variables.

7. The faithless category for January 2020 sample includes ‘atheist’ (1.82%) and ‘faithless’ (2.61%). The ‘atheist’ option was not provided in the previous surveys.

8. The base category includes those who self-identified as ‘Arab,’ ‘ethnic other,’ or did not respond. We should note that the base category makes up only a small minority. Given strong theoretical support for the Kurdish variable and support for the BDP/HDP, we included the Kurdish variable, leaving all others as the base category.

9. The ‘Turk’ variable was insignificant without changing the main findings of the logistic regression results.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mehmet Gurses

Mehmet Gurses is a professor of Political Science at Florida Atlantic University. His research interests include ethnic and religious conflict, post-civil war peace building, and post-civil war democratization. He is the author of Anatomy of a Civil War: Sociopolitical Impacts of the Kurdish Conflict in Turkey (University of Michigan Press, 2018).

Jonathan Fox

Jonathan Fox (Ph.D. University of Maryland, 1997) is the Yehuda Avner Professor of Religion and Politics, director of the Religion and State (RAS) project. (www.religionandstate.org), and a senior research fellow at Bar-Ilan’s Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. He specializes in the influence of religion on politics which he examines using both quantitative and qualitative methodology. His recent books on these topics include Why Do People Discriminate Against Jews? (Oxford University Press, 2021) and Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before Me: Why Governments Discriminate against Religious Minorities (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

A. Erdi Ozturk

A. Erdi Ozturk is a Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations here at London Met. He is currently working as the Marie Sklodowska-Curie fellow at Coventry University in the UK and GIGA in Germany. Ahmet is the author of more than 20 peer-review journal articles and co-editor of Authoritarian Politics in Turkey: Elections, Resistance and the AKP (IB Tauris 2017), Ruin or Resilience? The Future of the Gulen Movement in Transnational Political Exile and Islam, Populism and Regime Change in Turkey (Routledge 2019). His first solo-authored book, Religion, Identity and Power: Turkey and the Balkans in the Twenty-First Century was published by Edinburgh University in early 2021.