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Imagining the Peoples of Europe: Populist discourses across the political spectrum
Edited by Jan Zienkowski and Ruth Breeze
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 83] 2019
► pp. 101–122

Chapter 4
Islamic conservative populism in Turkey

The case of the AKP

This study focuses the Islamic/conservative populism of the Justice and the Development Party (AKP) in Turkey. Drawing on the post-structuralist discourse-theoretical perspective developed by Ernesto Laclau, it demonstrates how the populist discourse of the AKP substantially changed in this period through fluctuations in the boundaries that separated ‘the people’ from ‘the power’ as well as the components of both of these categories. While ‘the people’ signifier initially acted as an empty signifier that represented a series of unfulfilled social demands against ‘the power’ – the institutional system – that negated these demands, it gradually came to signify Islamic/conservative demands against all those opposing the AKP. This transformation involved a move from a relatively inclusive and democratic populism to an exclusive and authoritarian one.

Keywords: populism, populist discourse, post-structuralist discourse theory, AKP, authoritarian populism, democratic populism
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.‘The people’ as the subject of politics: The Laclauian perspective of populism
  • 3.Data collection and analysis
  • 4.Conditions of the AKP’s populism: The crises in the Turkish context
  • 5.The AKP as a new populist force
  • 6.Early years of the AKP (2001-mid-2011): People as an empty signifier
  • 7.People as a signifier of Islamic/conservatism (mid-2011 to date)
  • 8.Conclusion
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 13 August 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.83.05oze
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