HARALD SCHÜLER, Die türkischen Parteien und ihre Mitglieder, Schriften des Deutschen Orient-Instituts, Hamburg, und der Arbeitsstelle Politik des Vorderen Orients, Freie Universität Berlin (Hamburg: Deutsches Orient-Institut, 1998). Pp. 449.

Extract

Harald Schüler's Die türkischen Parteien und ihre Mitglieder (Turkish Political Parties and Their Members) is based on the doctoral dissertation he submitted to the Institute for Oriental Studies at the University of Bamberg in 1998. Contrary to the book's title, Schüler's main research concerns the Social Democrat Populist Party (Sosyaldemokrat Halkci Partisi, SHP) and its predecessors, although one does find in the first one hundred pages a good survey of the parties that currently participate in Turkish elections and that have played a significant public role since the coup of 1980. In addition to this survey, Schüler presents other research that does not focus exclusively on the SHP, including a historical overview of the number of political-party members in Turkey, the parties' politics, and legal measures that aimed at centralizing parties in the 1960s and at controlling parties in the 1980s. This information gives readers an idea about the special problems that exist between Turkish parties and their members. In his Introduction, Schüler shows, for example, that Turkey's political parties have trouble registering members not only because of special legal procedures and the general problem in Turkey of obligatory registration, but also because the parties themselves disregard their members. In describing the parties' sources of financial support—especially since the development of state funding of parties in Republican Turkey—Schüler also points out that membership fees play a negligible role in a party's finances because the regulations concerning such fees are usually ignored.