Let me state right away: I have no close contacts in the senior ranks of the Justice and Development Party (“AKP”) government or the Gulen movement. The analysis I am presenting is not based on any “insider information”. I will just interpret publicly available information with the tools provided by the economics, sociology and political science disciplines.
The Gulen movement calls itself “Hizmet”, meaning “service” in Turkish. They have two areas of service: helping the poor and education. They are active both in Turkey and internationally in both fields. Their educational institutions include schools, dormitories and exam prep schools.
AKP’s fundamental pillar is the alumni community of state religious schools (“imam hatip liseleri”) in Turkey. A quick look at the recent civil service appointments is sufficient to underscore the importance of the state relgious school alumni network to AKP.
Both the Gulen movement and AKP are based on educational institutions. However, the similarity ends here. There is a point supporters and opponents of the Gulen movement agree on: their schools are generally of high quality. From international academic olympiads to university entrance exams in Turkey, from the “Turkish language olympiads” they run to their placement performance to major US colleges, there is ample evidence proving the competitiveness of Gulen movement schools.
State religious schools, on the other hand, are among the weakest links of the Turkish education system. Originally founded to bring up community leaders, their quality did not keep up with quantity as their numbers grew. The university entrance exam performance of their graduates is poor. We have other anecdotal evidence pointing to the poor quality of education in the state religious schools: the shortage of Arabic speakers in Turkey, the lack of prominent academics in Islamic history and philosophy, the acute shortage of civil servants knowledgeable about the Islamic world and the long list of “fantastic” statements from senior officials who are alumni, to list just a few.
During the past 11 years under AKP government, being (or at least seeming to be) religious has become an asset, to rise among government ranks or to receive government support in the private sector. But among those who are or appear to be sufficiently religious, graduates of good schools naturally have an advantage over those of poor schools. In time, alumni of Gulen schools are bound to do better than those of state religious schools. So we should not be surprised to see the state religious school alumni seeking other means to make up for their competitive disadvantage.
The differences in the quality of eduation are likely to lead to differences in career success and material gain over the long term. Gulen schools have managed to bring up globally competitive students, many of whom were able to start globally competitive businesses. Such success stories are rare among state religious school graduates – they have not been able to move beyond living off public favouritism (often in the form of an unfair distribution of real estate speculation / urbanization gains).
Party preferences in Turkey are very “one dimensional” compared to other democracies. We can demonstrate this phenomenon easily by looking at the following data from the 81 provinces of Turkey: legislative election, local election and referandum results from 2007 to 2011, average per capita income, average bank deposit, car ownership, home ownership, secondary school attendance, urbanization, population growth, unemployment, women’s laboıur force particiation, immigration, emigration and net migration data. We can map these 20 factors into indepedent factors. (For math geeks: we first calculate the “covariance matrix of the provincial figures for the 20 factors. We then perform an “eigenvalue decomposition” of this matrix).
The variance by province of this whole data set is overwhwlmingly explained by just one factor. Income, weaşth, education, migration, urbanization and social change indicators are all highly correlated. Following social sciences and World Bank jargon, we can call this common denominator “human development index”. The human development index of a province is very strongly negatively correlated with AKP votes – the higher the index goes, the lower AKP votes become.
Alumni of Gulen schools have experienced a jump in their human development index over a generation. Propaganda can limit the impact of education and income levels on political choice in the short term, but socio-economic trends dominate in the long term. Groups which are integrated into the world economy and which experience rising human development indicators slowly but surely fall away from AKP. It is not surprising to see the Gulen movement go down this well established path.
Therefore we can say that there are two reaons behind the conflict between AKP and the Gulen movement: competition between two tighly knit alumni networks and the impact of socio economic factors on party preferences.
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