How Incumbents Perpetuate Uneven Patterns of Competition during Autocratization: The AKP Case of Turkey

This article, rooted in elite theories of autocratization, explores the AKP’s role in perpetuating uneven competition patterns in Turkey. Based on the AKP case, the paper argues that the institutionalization of incumbent strategies such as ‘authoritarian power-sharing’ and ‘Rikerian offense’ targeting the opposition parties helps to maintain the uneven patterns of competition during a country’s advanced stage of autocratization. Indeed, having experienced a loss in popular support for the first time in 2015, the AKP, as an incumbent party, shifted the primary drivers of competition from individual parties to electoral alliances in a newly engineered government and election system. In this way, Turkey continued to experience uneven patterns of competition resembling the conditions of the former three elections (2002, 2007, 2011) in which the AKP was able to electoral majorities due to the cleavage structure. To illustrate the argument, the article provides an analysis of the landscape of competition first among parties (2002-2015) and second, both among parties and alliances (2018-2023) at the national and district levels.