Local determinants of an emerging electoral hegemony: the case of Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey

Abstract

"Party hegemony" is a macro-level characteristic of party systems, which is a product of persistent and overwhelming electoral victories that leads to domination of the parliamentary system by a single party. Party hegemony can only emerge through a collection of individual-level (albeit aggregated), lower-level structural, and macrolevel institutional factors. This article intends to shed light on hegemonic party systems by incorporating all of these aspects. It analyses the case of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey as a hegemonic party in the making. Based on individual-level survey data as well as an original province-level dataset, the article examines the role of ideology, pork barrel politics, economic voting, demographics, and political institutions in AKP's rising hegemony. The replicable nature of the dataset enables further testing of these findings in comparable cases for generalizability.

The Determinants of Women’s Empowerment in Turkey: A Multilevel Analysis

“…According to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) (2016), 99.8 percent of the population in Turkey are Muslim. However, people have divergent levels of religiosity and this may be linked to citizens' support for political parties, especially for the religiously conservative AKP, in which religiosity becomes one of the major determinants of the AKP hegemony (Cinar 2016). To this end, despite patriarchal norms, values, and institutions around the AKP rule that cause a highly restrictive social setting for women, religious women may feel more empowered than those who are less attached to religion.…”

Political dynamics of local government reform in a development context: The case of Turkey

“…Its leaders, including Recep Tayyip Erdo gan, were largely seasoned in municipal governments, and the party controlled most of the country's municipalities by the time of its national victory. Social theorists have argued that the AKP was flexible and adapted itself to different local contexts; moreover, the success of their local governments has led to increase the party's share of the vote at the national level (Ark-Yıldırım, 2017;Cinar, 2016;Joppien, 2018;Kemahlıo glu and Bayer, 2020;Kemahlıo glu and € Ozdemir, 2018;Marschall et al, 2016). Nevertheless, Turkey has remained relatively centralised during the AKP era.…”

Political climate and regional well-being in Turkey

“…A related dimension is the transition of AKP during its successive election periods. Moving from a dominant to hegemonic party, AKP stands as a suitable example to investigate the clientelistic implementations and vote-buying patterns (Cinar, 2016;Arslantas et al, 2020;2020b). Referring to the resource theory (Greene, 2007), the predominant incumbent is eager to use public resources and politicizes the bureaucracy to reproduce electoral dominance (Magaloni, 2006;Szwarcberg, 2015).…”