 Michele Penner Angrist, Party Systems and Regime Formation in the Modern Middle East: Explaining Turkish Exceptionalism Why have electoral politics emerged in Turkey and nowhere else in the postcolonial Middle East? The nature of nascent indigenous party systems significantly affected the type of political regimes that developed after Middle East states gained their independence in the mid twentieth century. Three variables – the number of parties and the presence or absence of policy polarization and mobilizational symmetry in party systems – explain regime outcomes and help shed light on Turkey¡¯s political exceptionalism. Party system characteristics, treated as the dependent variable, offer an explanation for much of the variance across the region. |