DO TURKISH POLITICAL PARTIES PLEDGE IN LINE WITH THEIR PARTY FAMILY IDEOLOGIES? A QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS OF TURKISH POLITICAL PARTIES’ MANIFESTO DOCUMENTS

Year 2023, Volume: 7 Issue: 2, 1 - 24, 16.12.2023

Murat İnan

https://doi.org/10.61524/fuuiibfdergi.1362658

Cited By: 2

Abstract

In the Western political science literature, modern political parties are grouped into party families, i.e., social democrat, socialist, communist, Christian democrat, liberal, radical, conservative, farmer-peasant, right-wing extremist, regional-ethnic parties and environmental movements. Categorizing a large number of political parties into a small number of party families is important not only for scientific reasons but also for practical ones. A correct categorization would help voters to better evaluate political parties and make more conscious voting decisions. Nevertheless, despite its central importance, the party family is one of the least empirically researched topics in the political science literature. More specifically, the literature on party family particularly lacks sufficient empirical investigations into the link between parties’ issue positions and their family locations. Moreover, to my knowledge, no previous study has investigated to what extent the Western party family phenomenon able to group political parties in a non-Western country. In order to fill this gap, this study aims to answer the following research question: Do Turkish political parties’ issue positions, as revealed in their manifesto documents, align with their expected party family locations? Answering this research question I hypothesize that Turkish political parties’ issue positions do not correspond to their expected party family locations. Results of the empirical analysis of the Manifesto Project data largely supported this hypothesis and one can now safely argue that Turkish political parties do not pledge in line with values suggested by the Western party family categorization.

Keywords

Political Parties, Party Family, Issue Positions, Ideology, Turkish Politics

Do Turkish Political Parties Pledge In Line With Their Party Family Ideologies? A Quantitative Analysis of Turkish Political Parties’ Manifesto Documents

Abstract

In the Western political science literature, modern political parties are grouped into party families, i.e., social democrat, socialist, communist, Christian democrat, liberal, radical, conservative, farmer-peasant, right-wing extremist, regional-ethnic parties and environmental movements. Categorizing a large number of political parties into a small number of party families is important not only for scientific reasons but also for practical ones. A correct categorization would help voters to better evaluate political parties and make more conscious voting decisions. Nevertheless, despite its central importance, the party family is one of the least empirically researched topics in the political science literature. More specifically, the literature on party family particularly lacks sufficient empirical investigations into the link between parties’ issue positions and their family locations. Moreover, to my knowledge, no previous study has investigated to what extent the Western party family phenomenon able to group political parties in a non-Western country. In order to fill this gap, this study aims to answer the following research question: Do Turkish political parties’ issue positions, as revealed in their manifesto documents, align with their expected party family locations? Answering this research question I hypothesize that Turkish political parties’ issue positions do not correspond to their expected party family locations. Results of the empirical analysis of the Manifesto Project data largely supported this hypothesis and one can now safely argue that Turkish political parties do not pledge in line with values suggested by the Western party family categorization.

Keywords

Political Parties, Party Family, Issue Positions, Ideology, Turkish Politics

References

• Amini, B. (2017). The Radical Left Party Family in Western Europe, 1989–2015
• Bell, D. (1960). The End of Ideology. On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties. Glencoe (III).
• Budge, I., & Hofferbert, R. I. (1990). Mandates and policy outputs: US party platforms and federal expenditures. American Political Science Review, 84(1), 111-131.
• Campbell, A. et al. (1960). The American Voter. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
• Çarkoğlu, A., & Hinich, M. J. (2006). A spatial analysis of Turkish party preferences. Electoral Studies, 25(2), 369-392.
• Clark, T. N., Lipset, S. M., & Rempel, M. (1993). The declining political significance of social class. International Sociology, 8(3), 293-316.
• Converse, P. E. (1964). “The nature of belief systems in mass publics”. In Ideology and Discontent. ed. David Apter. New York: Free Press.
• Dalton, R. J. (1996). Political cleavages, issues, and electoral change. Comparing Democracies: Elections and voting in global perspective, 2, 319-42.
• Dalton, R. J. (2002). Citizen Politics in Western Democracies: Public Opinion and Political Parties in the United States, Britain, West Germany and France. Chatham: Chatham House.
• Duverger, M. (1951/64). Political Parties. London, Methuen.
• Elff, M. (2007). Social structure and electoral behavior in comparative perspective: The decline of social cleavages in Western Europe revisited. Perspectives on politics, 5(2), 277-294.
• Elias, A., Szöcsik, E., & Zuber, C. I. (2015). Position, selective emphasis and framing: How parties deal with a second dimension in competition. Party Politics, 21(6), 839-850.
• Falter, J. W., & Schumann, S. (2013). Affinity towards right-wing extremism in Western Europe. In Right-Wing Extremism in Western Europe (pp. 96-110). Routledge.
• Franklin, M. N., Mackie, T. T., & Valen, H. (2009). Electoral change: Responses to evolving social and attitudinal structures in Western countries. ECPR Press.
• Fukuyama, F. (1992). The end of history and the last man. Simon and Schuster.
• Gallagher, M., Laver, M., & Mair, P. (2011). Representative government in modern Europe. McGraw-Hill.
• Göle, N. (1997). Secularism and Islamism in Turkey: The making of elites and counter-elites. The Middle East Journal, 46-58.
• Halikiopoulou, D., Nanou, K., & Vasilopoulou, S. (2012). The paradox of nationalism: The common denominator of radical right and radical left euroscepticism. European journal of political research, 51(4), 504-539.
• Iglesias, P. (2015). Politics in a Time of Crisis: Podemos and the Future of Democracy in Europe. Verso Books.
• İnan, M. (2016). The Generational and Social Class Bases of Pro-Democratic Culture in Turkey: A Quantitative Analysis with WVS Data (Doctoral dissertation, University of Sheffield).
• İnan, M., & Grasso, M. T. (2017). A participatory generation? The generational and social class bases of political activism in Turkey. Turkish Studies, 18(1), 10-31.
• Kalaycioğlu, E. (1994). Elections and party preferences in Turkey: Changes and continuities in the 1990s. Comparative Political Studies, 27(3), 402-424.
• Kirchheimer, O. (1996). 6. The Transformation of the Western European Party Systems. In Political Parties and Political Development.
• Klingemann, H. D., Hofferbert, R. I., Budge, I., & Keman, H. (1994). Parties, policies, and democracy. Westview Press. Lipset, S. M. (1967). Cleavage structures, party systems and voter alignments.
• Mair, P., & Mudde, C. (1998). The party family and its study. Annual review of political science, 1(1), 211-229.
• Mardin, Ş. (1973). Center-periphery relations: A key to Turkish politics?. Daedalus, 169-190.
• McHale, V. (1983). Political parties of Europe. Westport: CT. Greenwood.
• Michels, R. (1911/78). Political Parties, a Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy. Gloucester, Peter Smith.
• Mudde, C. (1996). The war of words defining the extreme right party family. West European Politics, 19(2), 225-248.
• Mudde, C. (2002). The ideology of the extreme right. Manchester University Press.
• Przeworski, A., & Sprague, J. (1986). Paper Stones: A History of Electoral Socialism. Chicago: Univ.
• Rokkan, S. (1970). Citizens, elections, parties: Approaches to the comparative study of the processes of development. ECPR Press.
• Rooduijn, M. et al. (2017). Radical distinction: Support for radical left and radical right parties in Europe. European Union Politics, 18(4), 536-559.
• Seligher (1976). Ideology and Politics. London. George Allen &Unwin.
• Von Beyme, K. (1985). The Role of the State and the Growth of Government. International Political Science Review, 6(1), 11-34.
• Van Spanje, J. (2010). Contagious parties: Anti-immigration parties and their impact on other parties’ immigration stances in contemporary Western Europe. Party Politics, 16(5), 563-586.
• Wagner, M., & Meyer, T. M. (2016). The radical right as niche parties? The ideological landscape of party systems in Western Europe, 1980–2014. Political Studies, 65(1_suppl), 84-107.