Left–right reversed

Existing analyses of the Turkish party system suggest that it is unique in several respects. Upper-class voters tend to support the Republican People’s Party (CHP), the centre-left social democratic party, while poorer voters support the right. Unlike party systems in Western democracies, expert surveys find that a religious–secular divide, and not a socio-economic divide, best explains the general left–right dimension. Qualitative literature stresses Turkey’s uniqueness due to the long history of the CHP, its close ties to the bureaucracy and military, and the role of the military in politics. Lastly, existing quantitative measures of policy positions disagree about the placement of major parties. We estimate the principal dimension of Turkish party competition using electoral manifestos as data by applying the Wordfish scaling algorithm. We find that ideology in Turkish politics is reversed, with the nominally centre-left CHP employing more populist rhetoric typically associated with right-wing parties in the West, and vice versa. </jats:p

The Autonomy of the State, Radical Left and Karatani's Capital‐Nation‐State: The Turkish Left of 1960‐1971

The purpose of this paper is to provide an account of how leading radical left movements of Turkey in 1960–71 conceptualized the state. The analytical framework draws on the mode of exchange framework developed by Kojin Karatani. The Turkish Left was unable to theorize the autonomy of the state, the construction of the nation as an imagined community, and the importance of popular resistance against the state's destruction of traditional communities. Right-wing political parties filled this vacuum with the populist discourse of nation. The Turkish Left conceded its social base to right-wing parties and hence lost the opportunity of winning political efficacy. Our critical assessment of the Left of Turkey in 1960–71 is pertinent to discussions about present-day left-wing strategies that leave the nation and ravaged communities to right parties to exploit or utilise as part of their program