Dynamics of Party (De-)institutionalisation and Adaptive Capacity: The Case of the Justice and Development Party in Turkey

Despite the ongoing scholarly debate on its conceptualization and dimensions, party institutionalization continues to remain a useful conceptual tool to study party change. While there is no consensus reached on the conceptualization and dimensions of party institutionalization, there is a broad agreement in the literature that various dimensions of the phenomenon does not converge together and it is highly unlikely that a single party will achieve ‘full institutionalization’ along its structural/attidunal and internal/external dimensions. Therefore, more recently, scholars have argued that parties will adjust the balance between the aforementioned dimensions against challenges they face both internally and externally to achieve ‘optimum institutionalization’. This brings to the forefront the relationship between party institutionalization and the notion of adaptability. In the literature on party institutionalization, parties’ capacity to adapt and their level of institutionalization continues to remain a weakly theorized area of research. This research aims to contribute to the party institutionalization literature by trying to delineate the relationship between adaptive capacity and party institutionalization. Two main conclusions are expected to be reached: (1) Political parties will prioritize differing dimensions of party institutionalization depending on political uncertainties they face to enhance their adaptive capacity. (2) Political parties that reach to a certain level of institutionalization can de-institutionalize to increase their adaptive capacity against rising political uncertainties they face both internally and externally. (3) As a natural corollary of the above arguments, adaptive capacity may be enhanced for a party through a process of party de-institutionalization as well as institutionalization. In that regard, rather than being a necessary but not a sufficient dimension for party institutionalization, adaptive capacity is a context dependent outcome of party (de-)institutionalization for political parties. The research is designed as a single case study and will analyze the Justice and Development Party (JDP) in Turkey. To increase the number of observations within a single case study, this research is designed as a temporal comparative single case study. It comparatively analyzes three periods of JDP rule in Turkey to better delineate the relationship between party institutionalization and adaptive capacity. Therefore, periods of 2002-2011, 2011-2014, and 2014-2018 will be compared. This periodization is made to achieve maximum variance both in terms of level of party institutionalization and explanatory factors to better delineate the dynamics of party (de-)institutionalization and adaptive capacity.