When Belonging Fails to Pay: Money, Circuits, and Party Organization in Turkey’s CHP

• In Event: Economic Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Roundtable 8: Organizational Strategies

Abstract

What happens when democratic political organizations cannot generate legitimate organizational money, the routine resources required to sustain everyday operations in ways that express collective belonging? This paper examines that question through the case of Turkey’s Republican People’s Party (CHP), where membership dues have largely ceased to function as a meaningful source of income. Although CHP is highly institutionalized and receives state treasury funding, its local organizations chronically lack the resources needed to maintain offices, staff, and routine activity. The failure is not simply fiscal. It is organizational: the party cannot convert membership into collectively authorized money. Drawing on seventeen in-depth interviews with party officials across Istanbul (2017–2022), the paper extends Viviana Zelizer’s theory of money’s social meaning and circuits to formal political organizations. In the absence of functioning dues, three alternative monetary circuits emerge. First, sacrifice money (fedakârlık) sustains branches through personal wealth and unpaid labor, enabling survival while concentrating moral authority in those able to give. Second, patronage money flows through municipalities controlled by the party, stabilizing operations but reorganizing internal hierarchies around access to public resources. Third, tainted money circulates through informal commissions and shadow practices, generating suspicion that spills across all financial forms. These circuits coexist but combine differently across (district-level) local organizational ecologies. In dominant districts, municipal patronage stabilizes organizational life while concentrating power around mayor–organization relationships. In dominated districts, chronic scarcity intensifies reliance on personal sacrifice and multiplies fragile dependencies. In competitive districts, uncertainty produces strategic balancing across circuits without full reliance on any one. When legitimate organizational money fails, organizations do not collapse; they are reconstituted through morally fraught financial arrangements that reshape authority, dependency, and internal democracy from the ground up.

Authors

• Gokhan Mulayim, Montana State University

• Alaz Kilicaslan, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater