Abstract
The Kurdish conflict in Turkey, which is one of the longest-lasting ethno-territorial conflicts in the world, has influenced Turkish politics since the 1980s, and the Kurdish Opening process was the only solution proposed, except for security-based attempts by Turkish governments. Although the process ended in failure in 2011, its effects on party politics in Turkey have not yet been discovered. Berna Öney’s book Ethnicity and Party Politics in Turkey: The Rise of Kurdish Party During the Kurdish Opening Process is a rigorous study that fills this gap in the literature by questioning why an ethno-territorial party in Turkey, namely the Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), increased its vote share in the 2011 national elections, even though a dominant mainstream party, the Justice and Development Party(AKP), initiated the Kurdish Opening process.
The book consists of seven chapters investigating party competition through an ‘explaining-outcome process-tracing’ model, with reference to the ethnic dimension in a new democracy. The book takes the mainstream parties’ strategies towards the Kurdish BDP in Turkey and their struggle to capture ethnic voters at the empirical level. The author’s analysis at the theoretical level also sheds light on the role of ethnicity in party competition for other new democracies with reference to the importance of attracting ethnic median voters, the existence of a third party in party competition, and the relationship between party system and regime type.
She begins by discussing party competition and the ethno-territorial parties in democracies with an emphasis on the institutionalisation level of party systems and regime types. Tackling the history of party institutionalisation in Turkey, she demonstrates the institutional consequences of the 1980s coup d’état, which consist of a 10% electoral threshold and the military’s promotion of a Turkish-Islamic synthesis, leading to the party system in Turkey being transformed from an established democracy to a third-wave democracy. After these crucial points, the author seeks causal mechanisms by questioning how an ‘explaining-outcome process-tracing’ model can be applied to the Kurdish Opening process to reveal mainstream parties’ strategies.
While the author attempts to understand the materialist logic regarding a dominant party’s entrance into the ethnic dimension in Chapter 4, she also discusses the ideational logic of the explanation by focusing on the actors’ cognitions in Chapters 5 and 6 with the help of both qualitative and quantitative text analysis of parliamentary speeches on the Kurdish issue by the four political parties’ leaders in the Turkish Parliament between August 2009 and April 2011 and Manifesto Research Group (MRG) data, respectively. She utilises rational choice theory’s three strategies (vote-seeking, office-seeking, and policy-seeking) to analyse the AKP’s attempt to enter into the BDP’s space as a dominant party, concluding that the AKP adopted both vote- and policy-seeking strategies to enlarge its vote share, touching median voters on the ethnic dimension. This strategy was accompanied by issue compartmentalisation, dividing the Kurdish Question as well as labelling voters as democratisers versus status quo-ists, eliminating the ethnic dimension.
The author focuses on changes in the rhetoric and approaches of mainstream parties. First, the author uses position, saliency, and ownership (POS) theory to test the BDP’s vote share in 2011, discovering that parties’ ethnic strategies in Turkey are intertwined with pro-Islamist and secular-nationalist positions and that the AKP’s strategy tries to constitute hegemony by using nationalist rhetoric to create dominance over Turkish median voters. On the other hand, the AKP also attempts to use rhetoric claiming to be ‘the owner of Kurdish issue’ (p. 106) to attract Kurdish median voters, which actually manipulates issue saliency.
Second, the author reveals a striking change in the approaches of mainstream parties. Although the AKP seems to adopt a pro-Islamist approach in constituting hegemony over Kurdish voters, the party actually takes a relative deprivation approach by emphasising the discrimination issue. What she calls a ‘strategic twist’ (p. 127) using democratisation rhetoric that integrates the ethnic dimension into the secular versus pro-Islamist dimension to capture moderate voters. Öney evaluates this strategy in the scope of Riker’s concept of heresthetics, which is a dominant party strategy for destroying the existing equilibrium in the party competition to reach the dominant party’s objectives.
The book reveals three important consequences of mainstream party strategies on ethnic issues with the example of Turkey, but it can also be generalised to new democracies. First, the intertwining of the dominant party’s rhetoric is likely possible due to the dominant party’s goal of catching median voters. Second, issue compartmentalisation is adopted as a strategy by the dominant party to attract ethnic median voters. Third, the dominant party’s attempt to create a new dimension integrates different dimensions in favour of the said dominant party. As a case-specific inference, the author concludes that the aim of the AKP in approaching the ethnic dimension was to catch Kurdish median voters without losing Turkish nationalist voters, as well as removing the ethnic issue from the political arena to establish two-party presidentialism in Turkey.
The strength of the book is its well-organised structure, with clear theoretical and methodological explanations and comprehensive methodology, merging quantitative and qualitative text analysis – as well as suitable concepts from previous seminal works – to understand the nature of mainstream party strategies and ethno-territorial parties (ETPs), both from generalisability points and case-specific levels. The book suffers, however, from some weaknesses, handling the ethnic dimension only on the level of party competition, which is a macro-level dynamic, without touching on micro-level electoral dynamics affecting both Turkish and Kurdish voters in terms of voting behaviour. Unequivocally, the nature of the research question is limited to the party strategies, but this over-emphasis on macro-level dimensions inherently leads to the problem of over-determination, which the author already underlined as the limitation of the adopted theory. Lastly, I would recommend this book for academic readers with a background in political science, because the over-arching methodology and comprehensive terminology regarding party politics may be difficult for general readers.