What Keeps the Islamist Parties United? The JDP Case in Turkey

This paper aims to answer the question why and how the Islamist dominant party in Turkey, the Justice and Development Party (JDP) maintained its unity despite going through various endogenous and exogenous shocks. Since 2013, the JDP experienced one nation-wide social movement against its governmental power, lost the support of a major Islamist camp (the Gülenists) that had played a strategic role in helping the JDP come to power and witnessed a coup attempt aiming to oust the party from government. Most studies on this case have insofar explored the systemic reasons leading to the dominance of the JDP. Yet, a key and neglected factor that paves the way to such dominance is the unity of the party, in other words, the lack of splits which would bring about new parties joining the party system. This paper aims to shed light on this dimension through a number of open-ended surveys conducted with the JDP parliamentarians from past and present.