In such a highly mediatized and personalized political era, the current interest in populist parties and leaders has led prominent researchers of the field to take their eyes off the more conventional dimensions of politics. While discursive and ideational approaches keep dominating the analysis of populism, we certainly need to acknowledge the fact that the global rise of populism in the 21st century cannot be understood simply through the study of written and spoken words. In order to have a better understanding of the current strength of populism across the globe, we need to turn our eyes to the organizational and strategic choices embraced by the most entrenched examples of the phenomenon in their engagements with their constituencies and environments. One such populist actor is Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (JDP) in Turkey.

Since the party’s birth at the beginning of the 21st century, it has claimed to represent social segments that were excluded and ill-treated, and that were looked down upon by Turkey’s secularist high culture and politics. Beyond this antagonistic discursive dimension, the brand of populism that is represented by the JDP is closely related to Turkey’s concrete socio-cultural and political cultural divides. The populism of the JDP is not only about discourses around “people” and “the elite”, but also about Erdoğan’s and the JDP’s support among the rural and urban poor, as well as among pop and arabesk singers, football players and TV personalities. It is about the backing the party receives from the new Anatolian Islamic bourgeoisie, which is significantly lacking in cultural capital compared to the well-established secular big bourgeoisie of Turkey. It is about Erdoğan’s love for football. It is about his bodily posture that bears the marks of his early upbringing as a child of a low-income, immigrant family in Istanbul. It is about the tastes that he and the JDP elite display in public. More importantly, it is about the deep and belittling dislike for Erdoğan and the JDP revealed by the secular social and cultural elite of Turkey, by people who work and live in prominent urban centres as professionals, academics, musicians, directors, artists and intellectuals. This is intimately related to a “culture war” in Turkey that dates back to the modernization of the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century and the solid social divides this “culture war” has created between an official, urbanized, well-educated, usually better-off and internationally well-connected world and an informal, recently urbanized or provincial, much less educated, usually poorer and “native and national” one. The power of Erdoğan certainly comes from the latter, from his extraordinary ability to deploy the virtues and vices of this world that he knows very well from his own experience.

In the case of Erdoğan’s JDP, the discourse, the performance and the social divides I have touched upon so far have also been complemented by another dimension: a robust mass membership organization which was personally constructed and tightly controlled by Erdoğan. The organizational aspect of the JDP phenomenon has tended to be neglected in studies on the party, produced both in Turkey and abroad, due to the predominance of perspectives that focus on the party’s discourse, redistributive/economic policies and tactics, and Erdoğan. In fact, with its renewed and strengthened populist emphasis, complemented with new electoral and strategic instruments, such as a tighter grip over the media and political marketing techniques, Erdoğan and the JDP elite have created a resilient organization, a “personalistic mass party”, which is key to the predominance of this populist actor in Turkey for more than 15 years under fairly inconvenient circumstances.

From theoretical and methodological perspectives, my book’s examination of the JDP demonstrates the lacunas in current discursive and ideational approaches to studying the JDP, and the phenomenon of populism in general. It is much better to understand the populism of the JDP as a political style/performance that is deeply embedded in the concrete social divides of Turkey. More importantly, the case of the JDP illustrates that populism and personalism can coexist alongside a robust organization. In fact, populism and personalism may help to create this organization by resonating with the world view, vocabulary and cultural tastes of popular sectors of society. The cautionary tale of the JDP’s rise is related to these theoretical and methodological implications and leads us to the following questions: When is populism in power prone to authoritarianism? When is it dangerous? Populist discourse and style per se certainly do not create these outcomes. But when populist discourse and performance, the socio-cultural divide, personalism and the mass membership organization backed by the media and political marketing techniques come together in a fragile democracy like Turkey’s, the growth of a majoritarian authoritarianism with considerable bottom-up support is highly likely if populists remain in power for extended periods of time.

Toygar Sinan Baykan, Kirklareli University new book The Justice and Development Party in Turkey: Populism, Personalism, Organization is out now.