The Emergence and Rise of Conservative Elite in Turkey

Arguing that there cannot be, in any real sense, a government by the people,¹ many elite theorists have attempted over the years to explain the domination of one person or group over the others, using differing nomenclature to define these dominant entities such as “ruling class,” “ruling elite,” “power elite” and so on. Such conviction on the part of these elite theorists emanates from the existence in every society of a minority that enjoys more power, influence and status than the rest of its members, and, in Harold Laswell’s phrase, “gets the most of what there is to get.”² Moreover, according to prominent thinkers such as Mosca, Pirenne and Schumpeter, “new social groups” emerge in a society as a result of economic or cultural changes, which may lead to changes in the political system and in the social structure as a whole.³ In what follows, I will attempt to examine the changes that have taken place in Turkey since the 1980s that have paved the way for the emergence and rise of a “new social group,” that is, a religiously more conservative elite which can also be defined by an amalgam of “Islamic and modern.”⁴