Political Articulation: Parties and the Constitution of Cleavages in the United States, India, and Turkey*

Political Articulation: Parties and the Constitution of Cleavages in the United States, India, and Turkey* CEDRIC DE LEON Providence College MANALI DESAI London School of Economics CIHAN TUGAL˘ University of California-Berkeley Political parties do not merely reflect social divisions, they actively construct them. While this point has been alluded to in the literature, surprisingly little attempt has been made to systematically elaborate the relationship between parties and the social, which tend to be treated as separate domains contained by the disciplinary division of labor between political science and sociology. This article demonstrates the constructive role of parties in forging critical social blocs in three separate cases, India, Turkey, and the United States, offering a critique of the dominant approach to party politics that tends to underplay the autonomous role of parties in explaining the preferences, social cleavages, or epochal socioeconomic transformations of a given community. Our thesis, drawing on the work of Gramsci, Althusser, and Laclau, is that parties perform crucial articulating functions in the creation and reproduction of social cleavages. Our comparative analysis of the Republican and Democratic parties in the United States, Islamic and secularist parties in Turkey, and the Bharatiya Janata Party and Congress parties in India will demonstrate how “political articulation” has naturalized class, ethnic, religious, and racial formations as a basis of social division and hegemony. Our conclusion is that the process of articulation must be brought to the center of political sociology, simultaneously encompassing the study of social movements and structural change, which have constituted the orienting poles of the discipline. This article examines three contemporary political projects: white racial formation and suburbanization in the United States, Islamic mobilization in Turkey, and Hindu nationalism in India. The outcome in each case has been a racialized or ethnoreligious bloc. Our research question attempts to illuminate the decisive processes that are common to all three cases. To that end we ask simply: Why these particular social formations and not others? Despite the fact that each of these projects is often identified with a specific political party—the Republican Party in the United States, the Justice and Develop- ment Party in Turkey, and the Bharatiya Janata Party in India—much of the literature fails to systematically elaborate the role of parties in the construction of these ∗Address correspondence to: Cihan Tugal,˘ 410 Barrows Hall, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-1980. Tel.: 510-643-1956; Fax: 510-643-0659. E-mail: [email protected]. The authors would like to thank Howard Kimeldorf and Dylan Riley for their comments. Sociological Theory 27:3 September 2009 C American Sociological Association. 1430 K Street NW, Washington, DC 20005 194 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY ethnoreligious formations. This failure stems from two factors. First, political parties have generally been accorded secondary status in the grand theoretical explanations of social change. Once an important area of sociological inquiry, an unspoken division of labor has relegated the study of parties to political science, and the constitution of the social, such as class and racial formation, to political sociology, the sociology of race and ethnicity, or the sociology of religion (Burstein 1998:39,47,55; Costain and McFarland 1998:1). But second, this disciplinary division of labor, we believe, conceals a key assumption, held increasingly by both disciplines, that parties either reflect the preferences or social cleavages of a given society or are reducible to the social movements or states of which they are a part. Thus, for instance, Americanists have argued that contemporary racial conservatism originates with social dislocation due to labor mi- gration, the civil rights movement, and economic uncertainty (Carter 1995; Lassiter 2006; Phillips 1969). Students of Indian politics have explained the popularity of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in terms of the rise of the middle class, the growing political assertion of lower castes, and rapid socioeconomic change with the breakdown of state socialism (Chhibber 1997; Hansen and Jaffrelot 2001; Hasan 2002; Kohli 1991). Finally, scholars of Turkey have made sense of the increasing dominance of Islamic parties (ultimately, the Justice and Development Party) as a natural reflection of the balance of power between the secular and religious sectors of the population, of divisions in the ruling secular elite, and of dynamic movement-like activity on the part of Sufi communities and neighborhood networks (Gole¨ 1997; Huntington 1996; Lewis 1993; Mardin 1989; Rubin 2007; White 2002; Yavuz 2003). Those explanations that offer a larger role for parties tend to conceive of party practices as a matter of mere sloganeering or focus on the disorganization of formerly dominant parties (Aistrup 1996; C¸arkoglu˘ 2006; Edsall and Edsall 1991). The explanatory structure of these theories places the articulating practices of parties as secondary to the larger social transformations and crises unfolding in each case. The hegemony of the parties in question is seen as a fait accompli.However, using the benefit of hindsight rather than exploring the contingent successes of party practices reveals some important empirical problems. These problems stem from the larger assumption that racial and ethnoreligious appeals, as opposed to class- or caste-based appeals, for example, share an elective affinity with moments of instability and consequently destabilized identities. Existing theories, in other words, are hard pressed to explain why some real or available historical possibilities are taken while others are not. To fill the gap in current theoretical approaches that neglect this crucial mecha- nism, we offer a theoretical alternative that we call “political articulation,” within which political parties work to naturalize some identities and collectivities and sup- press others. We therefore challenge the notion that social cleavages exist prior to parties, while also specifying the relationship between party practices and the dy- namics of social closure. What is common to our three cases, then, is the decisive articulating role of political parties, without which the aforementioned social formations would have failed to constitute themselves. Parties, we argue, are often central to the constitution of the social because they give a specific logic to the reproduction of social formations. Without this or a substituting articulating logic, constituents of the “social,” the heterogeneous ter- rain of social relations (economic, institutional, kin, religious, ethnic, etc.), do not necessarily hold together. Following this, we define “political articulation” as the process through which party practices naturalize class, ethnic, and racial formations POLITICAL ARTICULATION 195 as a basis of social division by integrating disparate interests and identities into coherent sociopolitical blocs. Cleavages, therefore, are only the possible differences among actors who populate the social; they do not naturally carry a political va- lence, but may be deployed by parties to aggregate majorities. The three cases—the United States, India, and Turkey—have been selected as exemplars of our perspective as they typify three distinct and important political projects. We do not wish to suggest that these are the only cases that would demonstrate the significance of political articulation; toward the end of this article, we outline several other cases that justify a focus on party practices. Nevertheless, the case selection is ideal because it chooses three very different cases, thus demonstrat- ing that political articulation is not a historically delineated phenomenon that is only relevant, for example, to weakly developed party systems. The striking similarity of political results in our cases points to the importance of political articulation and can therefore be the basis of further theory building. In other words, the comparison is based on the logic of the method of agreement, even though our discussion of successful and failed articulation within the cases secondarily integrates the method of difference. The article will proceed in three parts. We begin by summarizing key theoretical perspectives in the social sciences that address the role of parties. These fall into two broad categories—one in which parties are seen as reflections of underly- ing cleavages or aggregate preferences, and another in which parties are effectively collapsed into social movements or the state. We counterpose our approach to the reflections approach while building on the social movements approach to offer a more sharply delineated theory of the relationship among parties, movements, and sociopolitical blocs. Next, we analyze the practices of the Republican and Demo- cratic parties in the United States, Islamic and secularist parties in Turkey, and the BJP and Congress parties in India to demonstrate how in each case political parties forged class, religious, ethnic, and racial formations in historically specific condi- tions. We contend, using counterfactual reasoning, that projects organized around such formations fail to exercise political effects when they do not do the cultural, parliamentary, and extra-parliamentary work to naturalize and then either hold together or supplant identities and collectivities

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