Abstract
THE PROBLEM OF INTERNAL DEMOCRACY IN POLITICAL PARTIES AND SOME FACTORS AFFECTING INTERNAL DEMOCRACY OF PARTIES IN TURKEY
Today, in modern democratic countries, the governance of the country is determining by the preferences of the people. The method of Representative Democracy has been developed on the reason that it is not always possible to consult everyone's opinion due to the financial and temporal cost of the immediate determination of election results, because of the population density of countries. The people participate in the governance by selecting some people. Today, the most important element in this participation is political parties. The political parties formed by a number of people gathering together by defining their aims, forms of management and organization, enter into a race to obtain political power according to the the political ideas and demands of the group of people that they represent. In this race, the political parties try to provide the superiority to their rivals by their rhetoric about democracy. In the other words, every promise and action to raise the standard of democracy in the country, shows the possibility of bringing parties to the position of power in the perceptions of the voters. In this context, the size of the practise of the democratic conventions in the determination of internal organization and management levels and determination of candidates in the political parties has a great importance as much as the message given to the society. Voters oftenly interest with the establishment and functioning of this democratic consciousness and conventions in the party, before the democratic goals promised by the political parties about the country's administration. For this reason, intra-party democracy is an issue that is being discussed and academic studies are made on it, in many countries. About a hundred years ago, German Robert Michels was handled this issue and tried to explain the lack of intra-party democracy by the term of the “Iron Law of Oligarchy”, in his book Political Parties. Even though the democratic consciousness in political parties has improved greatly since then, it is still possible to say that the “Iron Law of the Oligarchy” stil valid in most countries. The history of the participation of people to the governance in Turkey is about a hundred years, since the last period of the Ottoman Empire. An important part of this process was continued by interruptions. The duration of the existence of political parties in Turkey, also comes close to an equivalent period. However, just like democratic governance, the existence of parties has been often interrupted. However, democratic values were not sufficiently involved in the internal functioning of political parties, especially in the early periods. We can say that these problems still continue at a certain level today.
In this study, it is studied that whether the political parties which are the only apparatus of obtaining the power in modern democracies, give adequately place democratic conventions in their internal functioning or not, on the cases of the regulations of some political parties in Turkey. In this framework, the regulations of the four political parties (Justice and Development Party, Republican People's Party, People’s Democracy Party and Nationalist Movement Party) in the parliament with the highest number of votes will be examined and an evaluation has been made on the democratic functioning of these parties. When the regulations of these four parties are examined which were chosen as cases, it is seen that they try to determine the levels of administration according to democratic practices and establish mechanisms appropriate to them in the context of these texts. On the other hand, there are many issues preventing democracy in political parties. These are: the obligation to be a member of political parties, membership fee, leader influence, election method based on the members of the parties, political prohibition of civil servants and a culture of common obedience. In this study, descriptive method which includes the text analysis, is used.
Keywords
Political parties, ıntra-party democracy, Turkey.
