Islamist Democrats or Islamist Pragmatists? An Assessment of the Justice and Development Party in Turkey’s Democracy.

Although Turkey’s Islamist parties are under scrutiny of the secularist elite and the military, which regard Islam as a destabilizing and anti-modernist force, they have steadily increased their electoral appeal since the end of the Cold War. In the recent elections held on November 3, 2002, a brand new Islamist party, the Justice and Development Party (JDP), achieved a stunning success by capturing 34.31 percent of total votes. This paper argues that the JDP’s electoral victory offers a unique case to analyze (i) the reasons for the growing popularity of religious parties and (ii) how the inclusion of religious parties into a competitive electoral process promotes or hinders democracy. A review of the extant literature on religious parties’ expansion of their popular support in general and the JDP in particular reveals that their explanations can be assigned to three approaches: (i) religious parties emerge as a reaction to secularist values (conflict approach); (ii) religious parties’ popularity capitalizes on ongoing socio-economic crises (crisis approach); (iii) religious parties gain political power as anti-systemic parties (political alienation approach). Drawing upon the analysis of a national representative survey with 1000 Turkish citizens, conducted in October 2003 and a set of interviews with the JDP leadership, this paper tackles two interrelated questions: (i) to what extent the prevailing conflict, crisis and political alienation approaches to religious party support can be substantiated; and (ii) whether and how the growing religious party support translates into the consolidation of liberal democracy. Understanding the Turkey’s JDP enables us to address a set of broader questions: How does Islamist parties’ cooptation with or acceptance of the electoral rules transform the political views of Islamist partisans? Do we observe a unique interpretation of Islam by Islamist partisans when Islamist parties are accepted in electoral competition? Does the incorporation of Islamist parties into competitive electoral system moderate their political positions? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]