Nearly forty years since the publishing of ?erif Mardin’s work on center and periphery in Turkey, it has become a foundational meta-narrative utilized by scholars to interpret a vast array of political behavior in Turkey. This paper argues that it is time to revisit this critical assumption in regard to its usage as the predominant electoral cleavage shaping the party system. In regard to the simplistic electoral cleavage commonly asserted, such a position suffers on theoretical, empirical and logical levels. The theoretical underpinnings of a "center-periphery" divide coming from the work of Shils and that of Lipset and Rokkan illuminate a number of challenges in application to the Turkish case. The “center-periphery” division in both sources, being a product of Modernization Theory, assumes a “pre-modern” culture and anticipates its disappearance with the advent of centralization and democratic suffrage. Furthermore, the complex shifts in voting behavior and sociological research provide empirical evidence that further damages the notion of such an electoral cleavage in both the initial stages of the party system, throughout its history, and in the current context. Electoral data and party composition clearly indicate that the advent of multiparty politics witnessed two “center” parties mobilizing various segments of the "periphery" in different ways, with the victorious party appealing not to cultural but explicitly to material concerns. With the passage of time and employment of new campaign strategies, further shifts in voter behavior among groups in the so-called center and periphery complicate the picture even more. The proposition in studies of recent elections that a perceived clustering of devout voters on the right pitted against less devout voters on the left equates to the maintenance of the center-periphery battle seems to be unaware of a similar division many other long-established democracies, none of which would use such a classification. Finally, the logic of such a classification for the Turkish context is also questioned. To maintain the assertion of a “periphery” whose representative parties have been at the center of social and political power, in some form or another, since 1950 also seems to be a misuse of the terminology. Its persistence in the literature seems to be related more to its usefulness as a discursive device than to its explanative power, and thus, the employment of such essential diachronic cleavages in academic analysis of the Turkish case should be abandoned.