The Logic of Political Survival in Turkey

This book aims at exploring the logic of political survival in Turkish politics studying the case of the AKP and using evidence from elite interviews, party documents, public speeches, and developments and changes for exploring AKPs political survival in the chapters. These evidences indicate that there are four independent variables of dependent variable which is AKPs political survival; -- the legitimization of AKPs conservatism (2002-2007), AKPs power struggle with Kemalist elites (2007-2011), AKPs populism and authoritarianism (2011-2014) and the instrumentalization of Islamism and nationalism under Erdogans leadership (2014-2018) -- within the AKPs four terms. In other words, this research offers a cause-and-effect mechanism between the four different policy approaches of the AKPs four periods and the AKPs political survival. Indeed, the AKP has been the most successful political party at the point of ensuring political survival throughout its 16-year rule. In the literature, there are few studies analyzing the 16-year rule of AKP government integrally. As a result of this limitation, the original contribution of this research is that it offers a holistic approach of the AKP government between 2002 and 2018 with using the concept of political survival which is not explored for the AKP case in the literature.