Dissident Deputies Forced to ‘Exit’: Formation of Reliance Party in Turkey   

Previous studies on new party formation have mostly analyzed the impact of the institutional variables and the changes in social structure on new party formation. New parties in the literature refer both to the genuinely new parties and splinter parties. As such differences among these two types of new parties have been neglected. This work benefits from the literature on party cohesion and new party formation and underlines the differences among the genuinely new and splinter parties. Briefly, we argue that splinter party formation is a function of the established party’s strategies to handle intra-party dissent and dissident members’ strategic calculations on the opportunity structure surrounding political entrepreneurs. In order to prove our argument, we will deal with the formation of the GP (Reliance Party) which was formed as a split in the CHP (Republican People's Party) in 1967 in Turkey