This thesis uses a Gramscian framework plus primary sources to analyse the creation of EU membership as a hegemonic project (i.e. as a national-popular that programme unifies a particular accumulation strategy, state project and hegemonic vision by reformulating the collective will on and around a hegemonic principle) in Turkey between December 1999 and April 2004. It explores the complex interactions among national, European and global scales; structural and agential forces; and material and discursive dynamics. It studies the key role of TÜSIAD (the Turkish Industrialists' and Businessmen's Association) in the production of hegemony. Specifically, it focuses on the political, moral and intellectual leadership exercised by TÜSIAD and offers a new approach by analyzing TÜSIAD as a hegemonic agent, as a political party and as a collective organic intellectual. The thesis examines TÜSIAD leadership within the power bloc and the wider social formation. Conceiving hegemony as an inherently unstable process, it also reveals the weaknesses of the EU membership as a hegemonic project and of TÜSIAD as a hegemonic force. It also considers the recent rise of an alternative hegemonic project represented by the AKP (Justice and Development Party), which seems to undermine the EU membership for now. The thesis is based theoretically on the work of Antonio Gramsci and offers a critical realist and relational reading of Gramsci, inspired by Nicos Poulantzas and the strategic-relational approach. Other sources include the Amsterdam School of IPE, comparative political studies, media studies and critical discourse analysis.

The thesis asks a central question: what is the nature of the relationship between state security and domestic politics in contemporary Turkey? It aims to show that although the pendulum of Turkish politics has swung back and forth between democratic elections and military interventions, in the last decade a new set of historically conditioned discourses and practices of state security have fused the political and military realms to produce a peculiar regime which I call security govemmentality. Understanding the traits of Turkish security governmentality is the task of the thesis. It adopts a genealogical approach. The subject-matter analyzes both the historical-political conditions within which security governmentality emerged as a dominant practice of rule and the prospects of its dissolution. Indeed, the dissolution of security governmentality gained an air of expectancy particularly after 1999 when Turkey was granted an 'official candidacy' and started to adapt the EU democratic membership conditionality. Within this framework, the thesis explores the peculiar entanglement between security and politics in Turkey, which has produced an uneven distribution of power between the military and the society, and examines the challenges of the EU membership reform process to Turkey's security governmentality.

This thesis answers two questions: to what extent do older people in Europe differ from younger people in terms of their participation in politics, and why. It tests an age-centred model of political participation that is theoretically supported by prior knowledge about political-psychological thinking processes and the social behaviour of older people. The empirical innovation lies in a combination of quantitative survey analysis and the qualitative analysis of interviews with older people. The evidence comes from 21 European countries that were in the European Social Survey 2002/3, from British and West German national surveys of the post-war era and from interviews with older English protesters. The thesis focuses on voting participation, party choice and non-institutionalised political participation outside of organisations. Older people participate differently from younger people in politics because they have a different endowment of resources and motivation as well as of opportunities and exposure to mobilisation. This fact is due to a mixture of cohort effects, which are linked to the specific generation that the individuals are members of, and life cycle effects, which are grounded on varying social circumstances across the life cycle. Furthermore, older people benefit from a larger pool of political experience and possess a greater commitment to comply with social norms of political behaviour. Their political preferences are primarily shaped by their generational membership, whereas life cycle variations in political preferences are minor. There is also exploratory evidence that older people suffer from social stereotypes about their role in participatory politics. They internalise societal images about older people, one of which is that they should be passive in some forms of participation, such as protest activities. Thus, their participation level is lower than that of younger people even when all other age-related effects are held constant.

This research on the use of discursive strategies in Turkish politics is a result of an interest in the ways language is employed in politics. Although the political science literature about Turkey concentrates on the power struggles between political actors on the policy level, the use of language as a strategic tool to establish a discursive hegemony as an indispensable part of wider political hegemony is neglected. Especially since the AKP has come to power as a single party government in 2002, the increasing executive capacity of the party makes it crucial to deal with the discursive practices both to identify and evaluate the party as well as its policy-making preferences. Hence, this research approaches Turkish politics from an interdisciplinary discourse-analytical perspective in order to deepen our understanding of political power and discourse, with the help of a critical realist approach. Thus, this study re-conceptualizes discursive strategies as hegemonic projects and analyzes them with the help of the DHA (discourse-historical approach) in order to see the ways in which the ruling AKP tries to establish and maintain its political hegemony on the discursive level. In order to achieve these aims, thirteen governmental texts from three sub-genres of election rally speeches, party-group speeches and ministerial speeches are analyzed with the methodological tools provided by the DHA. After the analysis, the findings are interpreted to evaluate the current policy making process and AKP’s role of realizing the particular policy preferences.

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This doctoral thesis examines the impact of moderate Islamist parties on party system institutionalization in Turkey. Its focus is on the political emergence of ‘Muslim-Democrat’ parties. This term was coined by the scholar Vali Nasr and refers to a new sub-type of party actor in the spectrum of political Islam that employs Islamic religiousity in its electoral appeal but operates within the normative framework of liberal democracy. The central question driving this thesis is to uncover how Turkey’s Muslim-Democrat parties have had a positive effect in advancing the institutionalization of Turkey’s party system. This thesis attempts to contribute to the broader debate regarding the compatibility of Islamist parties and democratic politics in demonstrating that the former, when adopting a moderate format akin to the ‘Muslim-Democrat’ ideal type, can have a positive effect in advancing processes of party system institutionalization. This effect would then be critically discussed within the context of its impact on broader democratic consolidation. The AKP, Turkey’s incumbent party, is chosen as the case study of a Muslim Democrat party. The theoretical basis for the empirical element of this thesis is informed by the research framework for party system institutionalization that was formulated by Mainwaring and Scully in the context of Latin American ‘third-wave’ democracies. They posit four specific factors to examine the institutional strengths of democratic party systems. This framework is used to examine the development of the Turkish party system and the impact of the Islamist parties, especially Muslim-Democrat parties, on these processes. The bulk of this thesis uses statistical analyses of aggregate electoral as well as attitudinal survey data as well as examining the political discourse of the election manifestoes of Turkey’s Islamist and Muslim-Democrat parties using content analysis as well as discourse analysis. The findings of this analysis conclude that Muslim-Democrat parties like the AKP have indeed contributed towards party system institutionalization in Turkey both in terms of stabilizing inter-party competition and social rootedness as well as increasing the legitimacy of democratic civilian politics. In that sense, their effect on party system institutionalization has had a beneficial effect on Turkey’s democratic consolidation.

Every political system has a shared language of symbols, narratives and priorities through which legitimation is sought. This language is basic and schematic, yet it generates 'legitimate' priorities and objectives. My interest is two-fold: firstly, how is this language reproduced, disseminated and upheld? Secondly, how is it used, interpreted and adapted to legitimise a wide array of actions, policies or ideas? I seek to answer these questions in light of Turkey's EU ambitions. I sketch the prescriptions of what I call the normative core of Turkish politics, as expressed through national socialisation, the Constitution and the raison d'etre of key institutions. I show how institutions such as the military, judiciary and Presidency legitimise their actions through appeals to this normative core, thus reproducing it with little variation, while simultaneously reproducing a shared language of politics. I also highlight the wide dissemination this language enjoys through education and early learning as well as its symbolic reproduction through spatial narratives such as national sites, museums and monuments. Having demonstrated how this language is institutionally entrenched, widely disseminated and extensively used for the legitimation of public activities, I turn to the question of whether its constraints also create opportunities. I argue that Turkey's EU ambitions have actually led to the proliferation of such opportunities by introducing an alternative value benchmark in the pursuit of political legitimacy. Although the language is not abandoned, it is being actively enriched. After decades of tension and reform, the notions of 'secularism' and 'westernisation', cornerstones of the normative core of Turkish politics, are now open to debate. This could lead to a process of radical re-negotiation of political values. Alternatively, the constraints that the language imposes might actually outweigh the opportunities. For now, a delicate but fascinating process of negotiation is unfolding in the heart of the Turkish political system. My PhD seeks to explain and analyse it.

This thesis focuses on the impact of EU conditionality on democratisation in Turkey. Built on the assumption that Turkey's democratisation process cannot be fully understood without taking the EU's Impact into account, this thesis argues that even if external actors (e.g., the EU) can create opportunities for domestic political change In target states (e.g., Turkey), these actors cannot impose democracy externally; instead, they can provide support, or encourage power holders towards a more open and democratic system. Ultimately, however, these efforts cannot produce democratisation unless there are sufficient pro-democracy pressures at the domestic level. Empirically, the study examines institutional transformation and policy (re)formation in Turkey in the course of Its EUaccession process by conducting cross-sectoral and cross-temporal analysis. The analysis involves four policy areas and three time periods. These areas include minority rights, freedom of expression, the military and the judiciary; the domestic changes in these policy areas are traced across three time periods: 1999-2002, 2002-2004, and 2005-2008. The study is motivated by an academic interest in the intricacy of Turkey's long-term association with the EU and seeks to explore the external and internal dynamics of Turkey's candidacy process by employing theoretical tools offered by Europeanisation research. Following a Europeanisation theoretical framework, as devised out of new institutionalist theories, the thesis traces and analyses the democratisation process of Turkey and examines Turkey's pre-accession process at two levels. It first looks Into EU-Ievel factors to explore how the EU influences domestic change In Turkey with respect to its conditionality strategy and influence mechanisms; and secondly, it examines the domestic factors that pertain to each policy area to assess how EU conditionality is translated into domestic policy responses. Drawing upon data derived from primary and secondary sources, the thesis has three main findings. First, the recent reforms in Turkey represent a substantively significant effort to consolidate Turkish democracy. Second, as the cross-sectoral analysis illustrates, Turkey's strong desire to accede to the EU played a triggering role in the institutional transformation and policy (re)formation of Turkey. Third, although EU conditionality greatly influenced the domestic political debate surrounding the recent political reforms, ultimately the internal political dynamics determined and shaped the policy outcomes in Turkey. The research also reveals that to fully understand the impact of EU conditionality on domestic change in Turkey, we need to draw on both the external incentives and the social learning models, since they explain different aspects of domestic change based on diverging international and domestic level factors. As a wider outlook, the thesis reflects on the role of international organisations in democracy promotion, relating it to wider academic debates on democratisation and Europeanisation and their implications for domestic transformations in target countries.

Moderation does not constitute a monolithic model and the difference in the moderation process will influence the way a political party manages its internal dynamics. The cases of the AKP and the PKS show that both have different levels of moderation due to the different contexts of their social and political environments. The AKP has to deal with an extreme interpretation of secularism in Turkey that influences the party’s members to refrain from any confrontation with secular strongholds. The PKS has more freedom to express its ideology in the Indonesian democratic political system; hence the party is able to develop internal organisational procedures and programmes based on religious principles. To anticipate difficulties arising from from moderation, the AKP uses an organisational approach to give space for open and dynamic internal management and reduce the role of ideology significantly. The PKS still utilises its ideology in managing the impact of moderation by defining religious values as principles of organisation in parallel with organisational principles. Both parties are relatively successful in convincing their members to trust the party and its leaders in different ways. Party vision and personal charisma are more apparent for the AKP, although the PKS has to rely on interpretation of ideology as the main source of trust. By placing more emphasis on organisation, the AKP employs definition of violation toward party’s rules and decisions based on an organisational approach. In contrast, the definition of violation in the PKS relies on both religious and organisational principles. As a result, the AKP implements policies to dismiss members based on unambiguous principles with relatively insignificant opposition. The PKS has to deal with complaints of dismissal since the policies are taken based on interpretation of procedures and reasons. It is also proven that the AKP is able to convince voters by offering programmes to meet popular demands without relying on a religious agenda. While the PKS has been successful in developing an effective and solid party, it still has many problems in gaining support during elections as its pragmatic adjustment moderation also generates confusion internally and externally.

This thesis concerns the current ruling party, the AKP (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi - Justice and Development Party) in Turkey. Its aim is to examine the emergence and consolidation of the AKP, as well as to determine whether or not this has shaped the evolution of the party system in Turkey. This research draws on a qualitative research approach, through interviews with 36 key informants from political parties, NGOs, grassroots organizations and through gathering data in the literature produced by parties and other statutory and voluntary agencies, as well as through the collection of descriptive statististics related to socio-economic structures, migration, occupational categories, macroeconomic indicators and collections of election surveys. The finding reveal that the AKP did not emerge as an Islamist party, but because of its promises of economic stability and growth, and of further integration into the EU and USA-led global order. The thesis shows that more so than its religious discourse, the AKP’s electoral success was based on the party’s adapting a hybrid, progressive and pro-EU position during its first tenure in government. Second, this research demonstrates how the political conjuncture up to 2002 and long-term economic factors provided favourable circumstances for the AKP’s emergence. The study’s findings also reveal that the consolidation of the AKP is mainly attributable to its economic and social agenda, and the utilization of the public purse and other state resources (e.g. social and health care benefits) as a means of catering for its target constituencies. In addition, they demonstrate that once AKP’s consolidation was completed (2010) the party’s discourse gradually became more conservative and nationalist, giving way to more authoritarian policies. Nonetheless, as long as economic performance and conditions remain unchanged, the AKP continues to appeal to its social base. Consequently, this thesis demonstrates that the gradual drift in Turkish society towards moderate Islamic and traditional values was not the main factor in the AKP’s rise to power. Rather, this shift can be viewed as the feedback effect of the consolidation of the AKP process into societal structures and norms. Hence, this work highlights the AKP’s impact on the structure of the party-system and the role of its policies in transforming Turkish society. Lastly, this study contributes to the foundation upon which further research on Turkish politics and the party system can continue, by exploring the dual effect of the AKP’s ruling tenure: factors leading to the AKP’s emergence and its feedback into Turkish society and politics.