Elite political culture in Turkey: The case of Justice and Development Party

Even though there is large literature on mass political culture, indeed, there is so limited number of works on elite political culture. To my knowledge, there is no scholarly work examining Turkish elite political culture after the 1990s. In this regard, main purpose of this research is to fill this gap by shedding a new light on basic aspects of elite political culture in Turkey. In order to explore the basic aspects of elite political culture in Turkey, the ideology of conservatism which is argued to be "dominant" ideology in Turkey was used in this study. In this regard; the Justice and Development Party (JDP) elite was taken as case study and the records of Grand National Assembly between 2002 and 2016 were analyzed by applying critical discourse analysis based on interpretivist epistemology. As such in this dissertation, the basic aspects of elite political culture, and concomitantly basic principles of Turkish conservatism were examined in a systematic way. The results showed that, as expected, religiosity is the most internalized and all encompassing feature of the JDP elite so much so that most of the other detected aspects of the elite political culture more or less related to. Distinct from previous works, "pragmatism" emerged as a key aspect in understanding outlook towards democracy, the regime and liberal economy. Moreover, pragmatism seemed as basic separating line between Islamism and conservatism in the Turkish case. Hence; between 2002 and 2016, thanks to pragmatism of the JDP, Turkey witnessed three important transformations regarding elite political culture: First, the JDP elite perception towards above mentioned certain issues became more pragmatic. Second, Islamist pure ummah understanding evolved into religious nationalism-Ottomanism. Third, onetime Islamism transformed into religious conservatism. Key Words: political culture, elite, conservatism, pragmatism, ummah, Ottomanism, Islamism.