The Paradox of Populist Party Resiliency and the Appeal of Religious Discourse

• In Event: Is Religion the Blind Spot of Populism?

Abstract

Offering one of the first analyses of Turkey's president and its ruling party, Justice and Development Party (JDP), leader R. T. Erdoğan 's address to Mukhtars, locally elected neighborhood leaders, this article seeks to address one of the paradoxes of populist parties, namely their continuing success despite questionable performance. It contends that the main accounts of JDP's political support, e.g., prospective or retrospective economic voting (economic interest-based models), ideological commitments to change societal values (ideological interest-based models), and the charismatic appeal of the party leadership (leadership appeal-based models) all fail to offer a complete account of the party's electoral successes. The analysis argues that any assessment of the JDP's resiliency and appeal needs to take into account its performative politics, discursive strategies, and appeals by recognizing the role of religion. The analysis focuses on political style that draws attention to populist parties' performances that enable them to navigate different power domains from state to everyday life. The conclusions are drawn from a systematic content analysis of 82 speeches delivered by Erdoğan to Mukhtars and interviews with a group of mukhtars between 2015 and 2020. A review of these addresses helps explain how populist leaders present themselves as the embodiment of "people," balance performances of ordinariness with extraordinariness, and distinguish themselves from others with 'bad manners.' The findings show that it is the performances of populist parties which make 'the people' present through unprecedented public performances, accounts that mitigate the impact of various crises and failures, continuously assign "people" a corrective role and, more important, deploy religious idioms and norms to turn many contested political issues into non-issues that play a crucial role in their success.

Author

• Sultan Tepe, University of Illinois at Chicago